


Summer of Like

by heartofthesunrise



Series: Summer of Like [1]
Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Developing Relationship, Gen, M/M, Summer of Like, Warped Tour 2005
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-07-06
Packaged: 2018-05-22 09:56:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6074871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartofthesunrise/pseuds/heartofthesunrise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The scent of dry earth and juniper and the rich undercurrent of pot smoke floated past them on a breeze, and it wasn’t Joe, despite all his terminal sentimentality, who spoke then; it was Pete. “I’m gonna remember this moment.”</p><p>-</p><p>Summer of 2005 was when everything changed for them. Pete's keeping it together, but barely. Patrick is balancing his brilliance with potentially the stupidest decision of his life. Joe is in lovelorn, Morrissey-esque shambles. Andy is stubbornly keeping them from the brink of disaster, bless his heart. Featuring a few familiar faces: the FOB entourage, MCR, a little bit of P!ATD, and the occasional cocktail courtesy of Justin Pierre.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> If I don't start posting this now I'll never get it done.

**Thursday 9/1/05: Chicago, IL**

 

The first brisk breeze of a fast-approaching autumn stirred the curtains, and edges of cream-colored muslin fluttered just at the edges of Joe’s peripheral vision. It was a beautiful morning, warm and muted honey-gold, no pressing matters to take care of besides the task at hand. Joe was finally getting around to folding and putting away his tour laundry. He’d washed it right away, because he couldn’t stand the way his clothes always reeked of everybody’s sweat, and he’d thrown out the jeans he’d worn holes straight through, but his mountains of black t-shirts went unfolded in their baskets for nearly two weeks. He’d been distracted.

Joe dumped a pile of shirts onto the couch, eyed it critically, and paused with his hand halfway to the nearest one. He needed music, he decided, for such a daunting task. He picked through the nearest shelf of records - his favorites, kept separate from the overfull crates and shelves on the opposite wall - and emerged with a couple of likely contenders. _Powerslave_ , always a classic, and the English import of _Hatful of Hollow_ Pete had gotten him for his twentieth birthday. Forever a sucker for Morrissey, now with two tattoos to prove it, he stuck the Smiths on his turntable and sang along to “William, It Was Really Nothing” in his best, throatiest Moz voice, the one that he used to use to make Pete laugh when they were the only ones awake in the van on an all-night drive back before they had buses and drivers and hotels.

When he’d made his way through the first pile of clothes he reached for a duffel bag full of everything he’d taken to the laundromat - sheets from his bunk, hoodies, his few salvageable pairs of jeans and shorts. He shook the contents out onto the couch and was briefly startled by a small avalanche of pocket change, receipts, scraps of paper, and a handful of photographs. The stuff from his pockets he’d taken out at the laundromat and promptly forgotten. Most of it was trash - assorted tour detritus, dozens of pennies, hastily scribbled setlist changes he’d shoved into a pocket and left to soften - but the pictures, he should’ve remembered. It had been Pete’s idea, he thought. At the beginning of the summer Pete was so hyper-aware of showing them - everyone who knew what had happened, but the band especially - that he was happy to be alive. Joe thought it was kind of morbid, honestly, but it had been a sweet attempt, the way Pete showed up with a two dozen cheap disposable cameras the first day of tour and distributed them. “We should remember this,” he’d said, pushing a camera into Dirty’s outstretched hands. “I wanna be able to prove we did this.”

Joe flipped through the stack of photos. Some of them were blurry, poorly composed, but all of them were real. There were a few he knew he couldn’t have taken, because he was in them: a shot of him onstage, the pocket of his jeans hanging out through a huge rip in the thigh, looking like a lunatic with his telecaster raised. Another showed Pete onstage behind My Chem, sitting up on one of the amp stacks, his legs dangling. They’d gotten them all developed on the road, stopping at hour photo places in middle-of-nowhere towns because Pete was dedicated to the project, and the rest of them were happy to see him happy. Joe smiled, despite himself, and reached for his phone. 

It wasn’t like he wouldn’t see Pete later - it was his twenty-first birthday, and they were all going out now that they were all of age, even if Joe was probably the only one drinking - but the summery sunlight and the photographs, even the mounds of worn-out t-shirts waiting for his attention had him feeling some type of sentimental. He shot Pete a quick text - “ _thx for making us bring those cameras, dude_ ” accompanied by a picture of the stack of photos - and shut his phone. Then, on impulse, he opened it again and made a call.

“Hey,” he said when Patrick picked up.

“Happy birthday,” Patrick said. “What’s up?” Then, before Joe could reply, “Are you seriously listening to the Smiths? Aren’t birthdays supposed to be happy?”

Joe snorted. “I’m finally unpacking from tour,” he said. “Morrissey’s keeping me company. I’d be, like, open to other offers, though.” He held the phone between his shoulder and his ear while he folded an ancient Iron Maiden tee that was more holes than shirt. “If you don’t have anything going on.”

“Are you propositioning me?”

Joe picked up another shirt, the lettering so faded he could hardly tell which nobody death metal band it advertised anymore. “Please,” he said wryly, folding the shirt against his chest, “I’m just requesting that my close personal friend spend a little time with me on my birthday.” He dropped the shirt onto the stack of folded tees. “I can always call Pete, you know.” 

There was a faint rustling coming through the phone. He could almost see Patrick pulling on his jacket. “Don’t you dare. I’m on my way.” He hung up without saying goodbye. Joe piled the stacks of folded clothes into both arms, heading for his bedroom as the last jangly notes of “Still Ill” rang out from the stereo. He flipped the record over and surveyed the piles of unpacking left to do, wondering if he could con Patrick into helping him. Probably not. The main riff of “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” kicked in, and Joe reached for the rumpled fitted sheet. He thought of Patrick, already on his way, and his chest tightened. It was such a gorgeous day, and he was going to spend it with Patrick, and it had taken so long for them to get to this point, even if they were only barely there. Best to get the difficult work done now.


	2. I Miss You in the June Gloom, Too

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first month on tour is when everybody finds their sea legs. When you've been touring nonstop for years, though, it mostly gives you time to overthink things.

**Monday, 6/20/05**

 

There was all this golden light spilling in from the bus’s front windows. The view opened onto an impossible vista, somewhere in the middle of miles of farmland, fields of corn swaying in the stiff breeze and the road stretched out below them with a marching army of buses headed south. Pete was in a mood, wearing the grin he sometimes got that showed all his giant teeth, but tight behind the eyes in a way Joe knew better than to prod at. Instead he let himself be dragged up from the couch, hanging onto any available surface, to stand with Pete up front and watch the world go by. 

Andy stepped up a moment later and put his hand on Pete’s shoulder. It always seemed like there was some secret knowledge that Andy was tapped into that was just inaccessible to Joe, how to be close to people without coming across overbearing or weird. Or at least, Joe thought, Andy knew how to be close to Pete in a peaceful way nobody else seemed to have totally worked out, not even Patrick. Pete tilted his head just enough to tap Andy’s hand with his cheek, just checking in, his eyes never leaving the road. The dusky orange sunlight painted him in renaissance hues, purple shadows under his eyes and his jaw, burned gold along the bow of his lips and chin and where the hair at his temples was curling with sweat.

“Isn’t this wild?” he said, after a moment. “Like, we’re really doing it!” Like they hadn’t been in almost the same spot this time last year, hurtling through the heartland to a never-ending stream of back-to-back shows Joe couldn’t remember very well now. Joe never knew what to say when Pete was sincere. 

Just then Patrick wandered out of his bunk, and Joe wouldn’t have been surprised if he only just woke up, the way his hair was stuck to the side of his face and how his eyes were hooded, sleepy. Freshly awake, Patrick always looked smaller, more vulnerable. His glasses were askew and Joe fought the urge to adjust them for him. Patrick pressed in between Pete and Joe to look at the way the sun touched the lip of the distant hills and flattened out against the horizon. “Oh. Wow.” 

They stood like that, the four of them, for another moment until a lurch of uneven road sent Joe nearly sprawling over the rest of them, all long limbs he never learned to keep tucked in, and they were forced to make for the safer pastures of the bolted down couches and chairs. 

Sunsets always seemed to take longer in the summertime. The long rays slanted in and burnished threads of copper and gold in Andy’s hair. Patrick slotted a pale forearm over his eyes and settled down on the couch for another nap, and Joe watched him as he got comfortable. Joe tried not to watch the way Pete watched Patrick, for his own sanity. It was hard to argue with kismet, and even if it was supposed to be Joe’s band, it was for the best, he guessed, that they had whatever it is they had. Pete was chewing on the cuff of his hoodie where it was all ragged and frayed, and when it was wet with spit he rolled it back, disgusted, and sulked off to write, his golden hour smile gone. It had been hot and cold with Pete since the tour started, as if it wasn’t always. 

They were three days into the tour and the bus already stank like dirty laundry and boy sweat and Mountain Dew that Pete spilled on the first day and never bothered to clean up, sweet and acrid and overwhelming. Joe tried to feel pumped about headlining Warped Tour. He remembered begging his mom and dad to drive him out when the tour blew through Illinois in ‘98, not that they did. Less than ten years later it was unreal, incredible, and horrifically underwhelming. “Where are we going?” he asked the bus at large.

“Missouri someplace.” Andy didn’t look up from his book. Andy was fidgety, Joe knew, because they had just left Milwaukee and as much as Andy loved touring he had all this guilt to untangle about leaving his mom alone. Joe had never pretended he’d got the tools to really understand that part of Andy’s life, but he thought he kinda got it, anyway.

Patrick rolled over to push his face into the couch cushions, and Joe could see a pasty wedge of stomach where his layered t-shirts were riding up. He pushed the heels of his palms into his eyes until colors burst behind his eyelids.

They drove on in silence and sunset slipped into a heavy, pendulous dusk, the sky outside deepening first to purple, then to an inky, cloudless black. Joe pressed his cheek to the window and searched the sky to find the brightest star, and fell asleep right there at the attached kitchen table with its immobile plastic seats. 

When he woke he was stiff and sore and alone. 

The lights were dimmed but the bus had slowed to a residential neighborhood crawl, rolling his head gracelessly against the window as they left the lights of the highway behind them. Like most nights, they’d park at the venue and sleep as long as they could before whatever responsibilities and misadventures would claim them in preparation for tomorrow’s show.

Joe got shakily to his feet. He was up and digging through the kitchen cupboards for an aspirin to help the crick in his neck when he noticed he wasn’t alone. Patrick was still in his same spot on the couch, sprawled out, headphones on and laptop open on his stomach. His face was lit from below by an eery GarageBand glow, his eyes in shadow under his glasses. Joe downed his aspirin and flopped down onto the ground beside the couch, settling his head on Patrick’s shoulder to see what he was working on. 

“You’re awake,” Patrick mumbled. He was fiddling with a section of a guitar track, his hand careful on the trackpad of his laptop. He boosted the gain a fraction and played it through his headphones, closing his eyes to listen better. 

Joe pulled one earphone aside. “You could’ve woken me up, you know. My neck is killing me from falling asleep like that.” 

Patrick turned to him, his night owl smile flitting briefly across his lips. “I thought about it, but you looked so cute, I couldn’t disturb you.” 

Joe punched him on the shoulder. “Asshole. I’d look cute in my bunk, too, you know.” 

Patrick nodded absently. His attention had drifted back to the guitar track, but he saved the file and closed his laptop before setting it aside and rolling over to face Joe. 

“But then I’d be staying up alone. That’s no fun.” 

Joe pushed Patrick’s shoulder, scootching him to the side so he could climb up on the couch. It was a tight squeeze. “Patrick,” he said, wriggling down and trying to get comfortable. “You  _ are _ staying up alone.” 

Patrick scooted over, trying to make room. “Irrelevant.” They squirmed around, Patrick backing up and tugging Joe further onto the couch by the shoulder, until it became clear they couldn’t both fit. 

“You might be on your own, dude, sorry,” Joe said, bumping his forehead gently against Patrick’s. “Try to go to sleep, like, at some point.” He tousled Patrick’s hair. Patrick still had a hand on his shoulder, his fingers fiddling with the hem of Joe’s t-shirt sleeve, and Joe shut his eyes against the hope that Patrick’s restless fingers and the close proximity suggested anything more than a familiar companionship between them and the twilight zone affectionate attitudes they both adopted in the wee hours of the morning. Patrick curled his fingers into Joe’s sleeve and pulled him close to hug him. 

“Okay. Goodnight.” He ruffled Joe’s hair in return and released him, and Joe ignored the twinge in his stomach when he rolled away and got up to go to his bunk. He fell asleep quickly, but his shoulder felt cold after Patrick’s touch, and he couldn’t help wishing, as he drifted off, that he’d tried a little harder to fit beside him. 

 

**Wednesday, 22 June 2005, Kansas City, MO**

 

Joe was drunk. Like, a quiet kind of feeling good, headlining the tour so it didn’t even matter he wasn’t twenty-one, nobody was gonna stop him from having a beer or seven kind of drunk. Patrick was warm at his side, not drinking, carrying a plastic solo cup of water in one hand and periodically pushing it at Joe. Patrick  _ could _ have been drinking if he wanted to, because he actually  _ was _ twenty-one, but Patrick was weird about that sort of thing sometimes. 

“You want to get some air?” he said into Patrick’s face, probably too loud, but the music was overwhelming despite the fact that they were outside. Patrick’s nose crinkled. It looked like he was thinking hard, translating Joe from a language he was only vaguely proficient in, before he nodded unsurely. They pushed through the crowd. Joe remembered the afterparties from the previous year on Warped, but they had still sort of been nobody, and he had still been nineteen and hadn’t filled out in his shoulders enough for people to let him drink anything. He’d bummed a lot of weed off Matt Taylor. He made a mental note to track Matt down and hotbox the Motion City bus again this year, because he owed him one. 

The thing about doing Warped again was, it kind of felt like summer camp. It was a bunch of the same people, and they were back in the same handful of dead-grass fields in the middle of America, on the same sweaty buses with the same sort of brief and intensely-burning camaraderies you only got with people you weren’t going to see again for a long time. Joe collapsed into the grass a dozen yards away from the party even though it was prickly and brown, and rolled so he was looking up at the stars. Patrick settled in next to him.

“Sorry,” he said, giving Joe’s elbow a casual pat. “The party was… a lot.” 

“Don’t have to be sorry, dude.” Joe inhaled deep through his nose. The sky out in the middle of nowhere always felt like it was slung lower, like that heavy coverlet of stars was just beyond his fingertips. He put a hand up, then dropped it. “This is nice. Like last year.” 

Last year, he and Patrick had been turfed out of most of the parties because, rockin’ dudes though they might’ve been, nobody had quite felt okay giving the barely legals access to the full bar. Not that they’d been unaccustomed to being turfed. At least with Patrick on the road, Joe hadn’t had to wait in the van alone while Andy and Pete tried to get laid (with varying degrees of success) the way he had when he’d done the Arma tour. 

Patrick nodded. Outside of the circle of buses, the music seemed distant, and if Joe unfocused in just the right way he could almost pretend it was the sound of waves fretting at the shoreline. It could have been peaceful, if it weren’t for a guttural shout that sounded suspiciously like Pete.  _ Whatever _ , Joe thought. Andy would take care of it, if there was something to take care of. Andy always looked after Pete, even if he tried not to broadcast that he did it. Pete didn’t like being explicitly looked after, but he needed it sometimes.

Joe thought about how lucky they were to have Andy in their band. He tilted his head so Patrick’s face - upside down, so he was mostly chin and nostrils and glasses and the brim of his hat - was in the foreground of Joe’s vision against the backdrop of cloudless night sky. They were lucky to have Patrick, too. He was lucky Patrick was the sort of argumentative asshole who didn’t know how to mind his own business in respectable places like Borders. 

“You ever think…” he started, but he couldn’t remember where he was going with it, and Patrick let the comfortable silence weave back between them without asking him to elaborate. He was watching the horizon through his glasses, or - Joe turned his head to look out across the vast expanse of empty prairie below their little hill, the half-disassembled stages from the day’s shows, and saw only the faint, blurred suggestion of where the land might end and the sky might begin. Patrick was looking at where the horizon probably was, he guessed. “You look thinky.” 

Patrick nodded. “You should, like, come up here and drink the rest of this water, dude, I’m sick of holding it.” 

Joe knew Patrick meant something like “You’re going to bitch at me in the morning about your headache if you don’t drink some fucking water,” or, maybe less explicitly, “Sometimes I get worried about how far gone you like to get and this is me caring the only way I know how, so accept it, asshole.” Sometimes Patrick would say the first one, but they never talked about the second one, even though they both knew it was there. One of their unspoken truths. Joe propped himself up on one elbow and obliged, slurped, got a little bit of water down his chin and the front of his t-shirt but didn’t stop until the cup was empty. 

“Thanks, man.” Joe said it, but Patrick could’ve and it would’ve been just as true.

There was another loud Pete sound, one of his hiccuping donkey laughs, way closer behind them than the circle of buses was. Pete’s sneakers, the sound of his stupid flared girl jeans dragging in the dirt, that beery laugh getting louder and closer and then both his hands were in Joe’s hair, dragging him down into a lazy headlock and pushing his knuckles against his scalp. It wasn’t a full-on noogie, just an affectionate reminder that Pete used to be taller than him. “You took off with the life of the party, Lunchbox,” he said to Patrick. 

“He suggested it, I’m just here to make sure he doesn’t trip and fall down the hill.” Joe started to protest at that but Pete was laughing again, big whoops that would have echoed in the empty air if it weren’t so goddamn flat everywhere around them. Joe tried to crane around Pete’s arm to where the party was still raging, because he had a bit of a sixth sense about some things, and, yeah, there was Andy, inspecting a low, scrubby juniper tree and looking like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to bother coming over or not. 

“Hurley!” Joe yelled, and it startled Pete into another fit of laughter. “Get your pasty vegan ass over here!” Joe was pretty sure Andy just agreed to do the first record because he and Pete had all this history, and maybe he’d stuck around just because helping Pete out of scrapes is one of those habits you could get into and never really break, but he liked to think Andy had fun with them, too. He liked to make Andy laugh. Andy  _ was _ laughing when he sat down on Joe’s other side, and even though he made a face when Joe stretched his legs out over his lap, he didn’t push him off. 

Joe was still sort of wrapped under Pete’s arm, but he reached his other hand out to kind of nudge Patrick, so he could be connected to all three of them. He figured he was the only really drunk one, since everybody was still pretty cagey about Pete and controlled substances, so they would all understand if he wanted to have a bit of a moment. Patrick patted Joe’s hand amiably. 

The scent of dry earth and juniper and the rich undercurrent of pot smoke floated past them on a breeze, and it wasn’t Joe, despite all his terminal sentimentality, who spoke then; it was Pete. “I’m gonna remember this moment.”

Andy reached over and messed up the sweat-curled hair at the back of Pete’s neck, and Pete sort of leaned into it, grinning, like there was some hidden message in the motion. “I know, dude,” he said, and Andy smiled slow, with his teeth, and nodded. 

“We should get Trohman to bed before he starts asking us to carry him.” As abruptly as it had come, the moment was broken. Patrick rustled to his feet first, brushing dead grass off his jeans and then hauling Joe up by the elbow. Pete rocked forward so he could stand up, stretching, his t-shirt riding up to show the godawful tattoo on his belly. He slung his arm around Andy’s neck, reached out for Joe and Patrick with the other hand, and they made their way in a straggling line back to their bus. 

It wasn’t until later, when Joe was safely in his bunk, awake but barely, that he remembered the way the moonlight had glinted on Patrick’s glasses and painted the curve of his cheek a ghostly pale blue, and how glad he was that Patrick was there with him.  _ I’m going to remember that moment _ , he thought, vaguely, before drifting off. He was doomed.

 

**Thursday, 6/24/05: Lewisville, TX**

 

“Gentlemen, it’s time we visit our sons.” Pete was standing up at the front of the bus. Much to the chagrin of their road crew, nobody had yet figured out how to get Pete to stay put while the vehicle was in motion, and his prolific career of bumps and bruises from this tour alone trumped anything Andy’d had since he joined the damn band. 

“Speak for yourself, man,” he said, turning back to his comic book. “I’m not paying alimony until I see a hard and fast paternity test.”

Pete wilted. “Dude, I know you’re, like, not their label head -” and he preened a little, unconsciously, at the title - “but you could at least come to support  _ me _ , your  _ buddy _ .”

Andy didn’t know that he had much to say to a bunch of teenagers who all, by his reckoning, put too much stock in mediocre Chuck Palahniuk novels. But if he was going to be honest with himself - and he did  _ try _ to be, if he could help it - he was glad for Pete to have a project, and a responsibility. An obligation to set an example to somebody younger than him. He knew Pete hated to be babied just as much as he knew none of them could really help babying Pete, lately. 

He’d given them all a bit of a scare. 

Andy remembered driving to Chicago in February and how his car had taken four tries to start, it was so cold in Milwaukee. Something hot and protective had clenched in Andy’s chest, and he beat the side of his hand against the dash in frustration and let out a half-strangled shout, twisted the key in the ignition with a ferocity that scared him. Pete had been so slight in his hospital bed: a wisp of smoke, insubstantial, vaporous. Andy had wanted to punch him, but he’d climbed onto the stretcher beside him and tried to squeeze the hurt out of him, out of both of them, instead. And then they’d gone off to Europe without him, and when they got back they pretended it hadn’t happened. 

So he was going to spend time with Pete’s baby scenester band because he was an indulgent fucker sometimes, and he always was when it came to Pete. 

“I’m not talking to that kid about  _ Fight Club _ .” 

And there was that signature cheshire cat Wentz smile. “Deal.” 

Somehow the fact that Andy was coming along meant Patrick and Joe could beg out of visiting the studio - Andy was half sure they had bribed Pete by offering to pick him up a Jamba Juice. It wouldn’t have been the first time. So he sat in the back seat of somebody’s car, with Charlie driving and Pete up front with him, fucking around with the radio and trying to find something besides country pop. 

“Turn it back to that Hank Williams,” Andy said on Pete’s third pass through the FM stations. 

“You going soft on me, Hurley? I’m trying to find Metallica for you, dude, it’s a labor of love.” 

“It’s an exercise in futility, Pete. And I like Hank. You know. Comparatively speaking.”

Lewisville was a nothing town, and out of the way of the rest of the tour. Andy bought a pound of fresh apples from a Food Fair and forced one on Pete as they walked into the studio. He hadn’t seen Pete eat anything besides cheetos and Red Bull in days. 

“It’s good for you,” Andy said. He took an enormous bite and grinned, juice dripping down his chin.

“Gross, dude,” Pete said, shoving him. He ate the rest anyway. 

Pete’s kids seemed glad to see him. Brendon was all over the place, dragging him over to the soundboard and shoving headphones into his hands, goading an engineer into playing them all the vocal overdubs they’d apparently recorded that morning. Ryan - Andy was beginning to realize this was a Ryan  _ thing _ \- was sitting moodily on the arm of one of the worn-out studio couches, one ear occupied with his iPod, observing the room. 

Andy had a perfunctory conversation with Spencer about the drum sound he wanted on the album. He was a very nice kid. He pretty obviously didn’t know what he was talking about, but Andy nodded along anyway, and watched Pete smile at whatever he was listening to. When Pete called him over to listen he suppressed what he wanted to say (“this sounds like Patrick” - also, incidentally, what he’d thought about Brendon’s contribution to “Atavan Halen”) and smiled at the parts Pete pointed out. It wasn’t bad. They were talented kids. 

“If you clean up that bridge I think you have a really promising second single,” Pete told Ryan. They had a ways to drive before they could join back up with the tour convoy, and he was loitering at the studio door, giving last notes and keeping Andy waiting.

“They know what they’re doing, Pete.” Andy winked at Ryan, who, to his credit, hadn’t tried to talk to Andy about  _ any _ Palahniuk all day. He wondered if Pete had warned him. 

When they finally got back to the car - Andy had practically had to drag Pete away by the arm - Pete got into the backseat with Andy and slid all the way over so their shoulders touched. The highway rolled out into the dusk ahead of them and before they’d been on the road five minutes exhaustion set in. Pete had kept his grownup face on all day, and it took its toll. His eyes drooped, his head bobbed on his neck like a topheavy flower before he lolled against Andy’s shoulder.

It was good, he thought, that Pete had this. Insufferable misogynist lyrics that made his stomach churn aside, Andy had been glad to see Pete in his element, here. He turned his head to press his mouth to Pete’s temple, and Charlie could probably see him do it in the rearview but Charlie had been around long enough to know how Andy was about Pete sometimes. 

He was proud, he guessed. The hot swell of emotion that clotted in his chest was a many-layered thing, all built up with the way Pete used to look out for him and the way that balance had shifted and metastasized into something more complicated. He got an arm around Pete’s shoulders without waking him up - Pete was like a kid sometimes the way the highway was the only thing that could get him to sleep - and kept his eyes on the road illuminated by the headlamps in front of them.

When they got back to the buses, Andy didn’t complain when Pete went boneless in his arms. He was awake, trying not to laugh, his eyes shut tight. “I’m asleep, you have to carry me,” he whispered.

“I’ll drag you. You’ll get all scraped up.” 

Pete kept his eyes closed and put all his weight on Andy, his knees buckling, dirty sneakers dragging on the ground. “No you won’t.” 

And it felt kind of stupid, yeah, but Andy hoisted Pete up into his arms like a kid, so his legs spread around Andy’s waist and his arms draped around his neck. “Fucker,” he said, fondly, as he hauled Pete up the bus steps and dropped him in his bunk. 

“Yeah, yeah.” Pete’s voice was groggy, like he was already gone. When you didn’t sleep often, turns out you slept pretty hard. 

Andy pulled the blanket up around his shoulders. Nothing to be done about his clothes, or at least, nothing Andy had the patience for. “You did good today, dude,” he said, tucking the blanket in around Pete. 

“You’re such a fucking softy, Hurley,” Pete said around a yawn. He turned in towards the wall. Andy watched his chest contract and expand with the deep breathing of a well-earned sleep for a moment before he shut the bunk curtain, and, yeah, he guessed that was a fair assessment. 

 

**Saturday, 6/25/05: Houston, TX**

 

It was half force of habit, the way Patrick followed Joe back onto the bus when they got their marching orders. It felt like he’d spent years following Joe around - into the band, for one thing, and to shows, and back to the van when they inevitably got kicked out of shows for looking like they were both about thirteen. Not to mention around at parties and backstage, where Joe was their unofficial ambassador, always ready with a joke and a good first impression. It wasn’t exactly the commanding charisma Pete had, which was as often destructive as it was alluring - more like it was hard not to want to be around Joe. It felt good to be close to him. 

“You skippin out on the party, dude?” Joe asked when he saw Patrick climbing onto the bus behind him. 

Patrick laughed. “Don’t die of shock but I might be a little partied out.” 

Joe widened his eyes in mock surprise. “No,  _ you _ ? You’re like, Mr. Party!” They slumped down together on the couch. “I was gonna smoke, though. I can go outside if it bugs you.”

“Nah, you’re okay. Crack a window though.” 

“Right, because I was definitely gonna hotbox it, since I just love invoking the wrath of Hurley Burley.” Joe rolled his eyes, demonstratively throwing the windows wide open before settling down to roll a joint. Patrick watched for lack of anything better to do: Joe’s hands were steady, long fingers delicate and precise. He put his tongue between his teeth. 

When he had it done he pinched it between two fingers and held his lighter to the other end until it caught, then blew on it until it was just the barest glowing ember. He stuck it in the corner of his mouth and took a greedy inhale. 

Patrick watched him breathe out a Mucha-esque plume of smoke, his eyes hooded. 

“Can I ask you something?” Patrick said. It was a sudden impetus and he felt like he had to follow through with it, now, even though he already felt stupid for thinking it. 

“It doesn’t, like, require me to be firing with all cylinders right?” Joe grinned at him and took another drag from the joint. “Go for it, man, what’s up?” 

Patrick chewed his bottom lip. “Don’t, like, laugh but… What’s it like?” He raised his eyebrows meaningfully at the joint in Joe’s loose grip.

Joe looked down at it, not totally understanding. The moment of clarity came visibly over him. “Wait, you’ve smoked with me before. Right? We smoked in the van all the time. You know what it’s like.”

“We did, yeah, but I like… Never felt any different? Like, I don’t know if I was doing it right. And like, now I don’t really get it, I guess.” He shook his head when Joe tried to hand him the joint. “Nah it’s hard on my voice, I think. But like, I mean. What d’you get out of it?” 

One of the best things about Joe, Patrick thought, was that you could ask him something like that and he would never laugh at you, he’d try to help you out no matter how uncool you sounded. Andy was so edge he couldn’t talk about what it was like when he used to get high, and Pete was cagey about everything, always hiding behind coy half truths with his tongue firmly in his cheek. Hell, Patrick was Pete’s best friend and even he still didn’t know if Pete’s straightedge thing had ever been remotely serious. Joe looked like he was turning the question over, like he really wanted to answer it right, and Patrick was touched with gratitude. Or maybe Joe was just high, moving slow through molasses in his own mind. 

“You know how it’s hard to, like… You know I have that thing where I can’t relax if I’m somewhere new, kind of?” Patrick nodded. It wasn’t a secret, really - Joe was a complicated guy, he got weird sometimes, he took a lot of showers and avoided mirrors and he got down when they were away from home too long. Patrick didn’t pry about it. It was one of those things, he guessed, that made them all work so well together: they were complementary flavors of fucked up in the head. “Anyway. It makes that easier. I mean, and it’s just sort of fun. It’s nice to not be the smartest person in the room for once.” 

He grinned even despite Patrick cuffing him soundly across the back of the head. “Smartest person in the room, my ass.” Patrick was smiling, too, though. He watched the way Joe’s cheeks hollowed out when he sucked on the joint, how his mouth was shiny, licked wet, when he passed his tongue over his bottom lip. 

“You sure you don’t want any?” Joe said, his eyebrows raised when he saw the way Patrick was eyeing the joint. “I could, like, shotgun you if you don’t think you’re doing it right. You can’t tell Pete, though, he’ll never let me live it down.” 

Patrick shook his head. It’s not like they’re… He didn’t think Joe would let it get weird, but his stomach did a funny turn at the immediate and vivid mental image of the way Joe would seal their mouths together, the intimacy of letting somebody - even his friend, his  _ Joe _ , who transcended the boundaries of a run-of-the-mill pal - do his breathing for him. He watched the way the tendon in Joe’s neck stood out when he craned to exhale a stream of smoke out the open window, and the wet gleam of his bottom lip against the paper of the joint. 

He felt sort of… floaty. He remembered what Pete said about contact highs. 

 

**Tuesday 6/28/05: Las Cruxes, NM**

 

Andy had the same impression of New Mexico he always did whenever they passed through: it was dusty and hot, and there wasn’t much to do unless you liked gambling, which Andy didn’t. He did have a lead on a tattoo artist in Las Cruxes who he wanted to touch up a little of the color on his chest. 

“Come with me, Troh. You can get your first tattoo.” 

Joe looked up from his cereal. “Andy, I have tattoos.”

“Well, yeah, I know that.” Andy rolled his eyes. “What I mean is, you can get your first  _ good _ tattoo."

Joe flipped him off, but he was shoveling down his cheerios in a way that suggested he might actually come and keep Andy company. They set off in one of the crew pickup trucks, Andy behind the wheel and a Meshuggah tape in the deck. Andy drummed on the steering wheel. 

“You don’t have to come in, you could, like, hang out around town if you don’t want to sit around with me.” Andy suddenly felt guilty about dragging Joe off - he was young and on tour and enjoyed the whole band socializing thing a lot more than any of the rest of them. And he felt a little bad about teasing Joe about his tattoo. It  _ was _ a bad tattoo, just absolutely awful, but Joe knew it and the rest of them knew it, and it didn’t change anything to say it. Joe was already self-conscious about it. Pete’s tattoos were mostly pretty bad too, but he didn’t care and probably liked them better that way. Andy thought his were alright, but he knew people who’d disagree.

Joe didn’t actually ditch Andy to wander around town; he came in and sat down with one of the other tattoo artists while Andy laid back and let the pointilist pain of the needle on his chest overtake him. When they left Andy had a tender patch of vibrant yellows and oranges on his chest. Joe had a hoodie on. 

“Show me what you got!”

“I didn’t get anything, dude.” Joe had both hands deep in the pocket of his sweatshirt. “Mostly we just talked. I think I know what my next one’s gonna be, though, if I can get a half second later on tour to get it done.” 

“Yeah?” Joe nodded. He looked… Contemplative. Andy didn’t know exactly what to do with that, because it wasn’t unlike Joe to get in his own head, but he was usually either pointedly private or blunt about whatever was bothering him. “So what’s it gonna be?” 

Joe bit his lip, the corner of his mouth where there was still a scar from his lip ring. “Don’t laugh, okay?” Then he was gesturing to his forearm, talking about a crown and flowers and something to really commemorate his favorite album. How music tattoos were worth it because music was the only thing that meant something, anyway. 

“God, what is it with you and Morrissey?” He didn’t laugh, but it was a near thing. “You and Pete both, I swear to god.”

Joe kicked a pebble and it skittered out in front of them in the parking lot. They were almost at the truck. 

“Can you keep a secret?”

“A secret about Morrissey?”

“Shut up, dude, I’m serious.” Joe looked it, not making eye contact with Andy, scuffing the toe of his sneaker into the ground. 

“Yeah, man, I can keep a secret.” 

“I like… Might not be.” He exhaled. “One hundred percent totally heterosexual.” 

Andy blinked. It had honestly been the last thing he’d expected. Not that Joe seemed uptight, or close-minded, but it seemed like he had himself pretty well figured out. It was easy to forget sometimes that there was such a wide age gap in the band, he guessed. “Okay,” he said. He fought the urge to put a fraternal hand on Joe’s shoulder. He didn’t want to make a big deal of it. “Are you like… I mean on a scale of, like, one to ten, where’s your inner turmoil at?” His hands wouldn’t stay at his sides. He slugged Joe on the shoulder to lighten the mood. It was exactly as awkward as it sounds.

“Y’know. It’s not like I didn’t, like, kinda know for a while. I’m gonna go ahead and keep not dealing with it until I have to, though.” Joe laughed. “Like, I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.”

“Right.” Andy snorted. He unlocked the truck and as they were driving away, a Slayer tape swapped into the tape deck and churning through the speakers, and he still kind of wanted to  _ say _ something. Because Andy was resistant to most labels besides the ones he tattooed on his wrists, but he knew how weird and hard it was to come up in hardcore and be some flavor of queer. It wasn’t a big deal for him anymore but it had been once. And he saw the way Joe looked at Patrick sometimes, the same way everybody, Andy included, had used to look at Pete back before they’d all grown some goddamn common sense. Andy knew, basically, what it was like to have some kind of ambiguous history with a bandmate, and Joe didn’t have a Mixon to call about it. They’d been driving for fifteen minutes when he spoke, his eyes still on the road.

“So you, like, want to fuck Morrissey?” 

Joe socked him in the arm. They were going to be okay.

Later that day, after their set was done, Andy decided to take a walk. It was good and loud, the way Andy liked it. He shrugged for the pleasure of feeling his muscles resettle, to let the tension ease from his body. The festival field was on the NMSU campus, spread out and ripe for wandering, the sky wide and airbrushed with clouds above him. He pulled his hood up and set out down a winding bike path. It was good, he thought, to be able to be alone. 

There was a pond up ahead, a serendipitous little surprise, all brocaded over with summer algae and crowded with ducks. Andy sat on the edge of the bank and breathed in the wet, decaying scent of the stagnant water, of something besides bus exhaust and sweat and hot asphalt highway. It was a relief. He looked up at the little bridge arching demurely over the pond and was surprised to see Pete there, looking tired but pleased, with Mikey Way. They were limned in the pink and orange light of the sunset, picturesque. Pete was fiddling with his phone, typing and laughing and talking. 

Andy was glad, not for the first time that summer, that they were out on tour with friends. 

Pete turned and said something to Mikey, his smile giddy and huge, and he held out his hand for a low-five. Mikey slapped his palm; his touch lingered. Pete’s smile slipped into something more serious but not unhappy, and Andy looked away. He knew Pete too well. 

He traced a path around the perimeter of the pond and headed back to the bus.

 

**Monday 7/4/05: Fresno, CA**

 

“Look,” Joe said, holding the cup in neutral ground between both of them. “I’m not saying, ‘Yeah Patrick drink this,’ I’m just saying you look like you want to, and it’s okay to try it if you want.” 

Patrick chewed his lip. It was something he’d been thinking about, honestly, a lot this summer. Above them, a volley of fireworks bloomed, orange and pink against the dark sky. 

“I’ll like, make sure you don’t drink too much. I can take care of you for a change.” Joe shifted the cup towards Patrick’s hand, which was already open in anticipation to receive it. 

“You’re not drinking?” 

Joe huffed a laugh. “It’s a little late for that, dude, I’m just sayin’ I’ll stick next to you and keep an eye on you or whatever. Make sure you don’t pull a Hendrix.” 

Patrick did some more lip-chewing, but he was already reaching out for the cup. It was something sickly sweet that Justin was giving out, coke and pomegranate vodka, and it felt thick and sugary against Patrick’s tongue when he gulped it down. 

Joe snagged Justin and got a cup for himself, tipping it back with practiced ease before guiding Patrick by the elbow over to the risers of empty seats. Every festival ground in America looked exactly the same with their tents and stages and equipment half-assembled on it. They sat, and Patrick downed his drink fast. 

“You good?” Joe was looking at him, all big eyes and grin.

Patrick nodded. A shrill whistle in the air around them was followed the a burst of purple sparks, bathing them in alien light for a moment. Down below the bleachers, Pete was racing across the field, all deceptively graceful limbs. Ray and Mikey followed sedately behind him, talking quietly to each other. Justin had cornered Frank and was pushing a cup into his hands, grinning, shark-like. It was good, it was exactly the summer he wanted. “This is nice.” 

“Yeah?” It was good to see Joe so pleased. It made Patrick’s chest tight, made him nostalgic for the after-gig time they used to spend together on their first summer tour. He remembered one night especially, somewhere in Ohio, sticky and humid, when the two of them had sat by the shore of a small lake while Andy and Pete had crashed some girl’s birthday party, leaving Patrick and Joe to load the equipment and then amuse themselves until morning. 

Joe had kicked off his sneakers and waded into the lake up to the knee, his jeans rolled up, and looked at the bright, low-hanging moon off in the distance with the goofiest grin. 

“What?” Patrick had asked. The moon reflected in Joe’s big eyes, painted a pale stripe of light down the ridge of his nose. He’d been scrawnier then, they both had, and Patrick was remembering him complete with the sharp angles of his elbows and the way his collarbones stood out under the smooth line of his t-shirt. He was remembering him young. 

“Just, like…” He had turned his gaze on Patrick. “I mean, this is real. We’re doing this.”

Patrick had laughed because it wasn’t even Joe’s first tour, he’d been out with Arma the summer before, but he was still grinning like a loon. He splashed back out of the shallows and shucked his shirt and flopped down into the grass. 

“I mean,” he had said, looking up at Patrick, “this is my band, and it’s happening. And you’re here, and Pete’s in it, and Hurley agreed to come out with us and give it a try which is basically a dream come true and such a fucking longshot, like, I just. I just hope I don’t wake up.”

A bead of sweat had slid down the curve of his throat. His bleach job was growing out, ugly and patchy with wide spots of brown. He looked so incredulous. Patrick could’ve kissed him. 

There under the fireworks, Patrick watched the sky light Joe’s face the same way. He was broader, filled out, all his sharp angles hammered out into smooth edges. Patrick put a fond hand on his shoulder as he stood up. 

“I’m going to obtain us a couple more drinks. If I fall down, please come save me.” Words felt odd on his heavy tongue, but he made his way down the bleacher steps without any more difficulty than usual, and though the field was a wide and pale moonscape under the odd light of the fireworks, he walked in a more or less straight line across it. Justin, by this point no longer content to bartend, had left a table full of bottles and cups for any eager taker. Patrick eyeballed a generous pour of vodka into each of a pair of clean-looking plastic cups and topped them both up with fruit punch.

He could see Joe on the bleachers across the field, a little speck halfway up, all disheveled curls and bare arms, watching him to make sure he made it back okay. He smiled even though Joe was too far away to see. 

Out in the middle of the field, there was what looked like the beginnings of an impromptu wrestling match between a handful of guys from the crew. Justin and Frank, sharing a precariously full cup of something, looked on as referees. Patrick decided to skirt around the edge of the field, one eye on the action, to avoid getting dragged in. He’d known Justin for too long to think he wasn’t up to mischief, and with Frank in the mix it was anyone’s ballgame. Shouts erupted from the guys in the middle of the ring, and Patrick moved further in towards the shelter of the buses. 

Passing by the My Chem bus, Patrick paused and took a long drink from his very boozy amateur cocktail. He was searching for Joe, maybe twenty yards away, a little further down the bleachers so he could chat to a group of passing friends. Joe, ever the social butterfly. Patrick smiled, ready to start off again, when he heard a noise and turned to look. He wouldn’t have cared, but it sounded like Pete. Specifically, it sounded like Pete’s “I’m getting off with a scene groupie in public” groan, which was specific and nauseatingly familiar, and Patrick was drunk and curious, because he hadn’t heard it in months. 

He peered around the side of the bus and nearly dropped the cups in his hands. 

Pete was indeed getting off with a scene groupie, if by scene groupie you meant close friend, respected musician, and occasional stand-in bassist Mikey Way. Patrick turned around very fast, slopping vodka from the cups over both his hands, and hurried back towards the bleachers where Joe was sitting alone again, watching the fireworks. 

“There you are!” he said. “I was about to send out a search party.” 

Patrick  pressed the cup into his hands. 

“I need to get very drunk very fast without you asking me why.”

Joe raised a skeptical eyebrow but said nothing. He lifted his cup to his lips and took a generous gulp. Patrick mirrored him. 

The visual still burned behind his eyes, Pete backed up against the side of the bus with Mikey leaning over him, attached at the mouth, one hand on Pete’s neck and the other fiddling with the hem of his t-shirt. Pete had looked pliant, both hands on Mikey’s back, holding him with the sort of tenderness Patrick didn’t associate with Pete’s hookups. Maybe it was different because Mikey was a friend. Maybe it was different for other, more obvious reasons. 

He took another swig from his drink. Joe was still watching him, his eyes serious and concerned, but it wasn’t like Joe to pry. Patrick was especially grateful for that right now. 

“Hey, slow down,” Joe said, putting a hand on Patrick’s arm when he made to finish his drink. “Like, I’m not gonna ask, but. You’ll be feeling it in a minute, just hang on. You’re gonna make yourself sick.”

Patrick put his cup down on the bench and leaned against Joe’s shoulder. He was feeling over-warm, and confused by what he’d seen, and it was hard to be with Joe when all summer he’d been telling himself that whatever slightly ambiguous feelings he might have could never come to fruition, but apparently Pete could get off with Mikey Way. Except it was never really hard to be with Joe, because he was Joe, and he made it easy. Patrick patted Joe’s hand clumsily. He suddenly felt very drunk. 

“Can we take a walk?” he said into the soft juncture of Joe’s neck and shoulder. 

“Sure, buddy.” Joe hauled him up and helped him down the bleacher steps, abandoning their half-finished - and probably dangerously strong - drinks. He slung a long arm around Patrick’s waist and led him in a meandering route past a table with coolers of water. Joe stooped to grab one and twisted the top off, pressing it into Patrick’s hands with a casualness that made his heart ache. Joe was so good and so kind. Patrick was so drunk. It hit him all at once. He gripped Joe’s arm above the elbow and let himself be led. 

The bus was quiet. Andy might be asleep, and Patrick had a pretty good idea of where Pete was. His stomach churned. Joe was noisily but capably going through the medicine cabinet, handing Patrick two aspirin and encouraging the water bottle up towards his mouth. “Come on, man, you make this drunk babysitter thing look easy.” Patrick swallowed, obedient, grateful for Joe’s big hand on the back of his neck. He was unsteady on his feet and he fell back onto the couch, tugging Joe with him so that they sat slumped together, exhausted and too hot under his t-shirt. 

“I’m…” Patrick started. He waved his hand around, trying to demonstrate. “It’s all moving.” 

“You’ve got the spins.” Joe grinned. Dickhead. 

“I do  _ not _ like the spins,” Patrick mumbled. He tried to close his eyes against the motion of the room around them, but to no avail. He leaned on Joe’s shoulder and hung onto his arm for a moment until he could find a still point, a stable fixture to hold onto while the world swung around him. He tightened his grip on Joe’s forearm.

Joe leaned his head down and rested his cheek against the top of Patrick’s head. “You doin’ okay, dude?” he asked. 

And just as suddenly as he hadn’t been, Patrick was. He was still drunk, he was still sick with worry about what he’d seen, about Pete and the myriad ways this affair might explode, but he pinched the bridge of his nose under his glasses and nodded. “Sorry, got a little pukey there for a minute.” Joe patted his knee. Joe was a blessed angel. 

“You should try to stay awake for a little while. Finish that water, but go slow.” 

They watched the second half of a kung fu movie Andy had left paused in the DVD player and split an orange while Patrick finished his water. Joe had his arm protectively around Patrick’s shoulders, and it made him feel a little patronised, to be honest, because yeah, he didn’t get drunk a lot but he hadn’t even done anything awful. Patrick still remembered the time Joe had gotten wasted and passed out in the back of the van, and had thrown up directly into Patrick’s backpack of clean laundry when he’d woken up. But Joe was warm and solid and comfortable, and Patrick was happy for the excuse to enjoy his physical affection. Joe wasn’t the most demonstrative guy in the world. 

When the movie credits started rolling, Joe turned to look down at Patrick, who was slumped bonelessly against him. “You think you’re sober enough for bed?” He held Patrick’s chin between his thumb and forefinger and tilted his face up. His hands smelled like orange peels. 

“Mm-hmm.” 

“Okay, party animal. Come on, get up.” He coaxed Patrick to his feet and helped him up into his bunk. It was so sweet, so genuine. Patrick hoped Joe felt this well cared for when it was Patrick doing the caring. He settled in for bed and Joe disappeared from his field of vision, then returned with a fresh water bottle. “You’ll want this at like five in the morning I bet. No need to thank me.” He grinned, that big goofy Joe smile that showed all his teeth.

Patrick sat up a little and reached for him and pulled him in for a hug. Joe was so good. He was so glad to be here, so overcome, so not ready to deal with the inevitable train wreck that Pete was going to bring down on their band. It was a moment before Patrick realized he’d kissed Joe right on his goofy smiling mouth.

They had kissed before, the same way they had both kissed Pete and Gabe, in jokey fits of half-drunk affection, and this was haltingly different than any of those encounters. In fact, remembering them now was alienating, even as Patrick opened his mouth against Joe’s and pulled him a little closer. Joe’s hand came up to rest on the side of Patrick’s neck. The gesture was stiff and awkward, and Patrick pulled away and looked at Joe’s closed eyes.  _ Oh, hell _ , he thought vaguely. 

An enterprising, entirely conscious part of his terrible drunk brain made him slump back down into his bunk, blink sleepily, and say “goodnight” before rolling over and falling straight to sleep, a defense mechanism against his own goddamn terrible decisions. 

He didn’t see Joe raise his hand to his mouth and touch his bottom lip. He didn’t hear him say “goodnight,” faint and disbelieving, as he got into his own bunk and pulled the curtain shut. 


	3. Pick Your Poison, Pour Yourself a Glass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everything gets worse before it gets better. Also, Matt Mixon is there.

**Wednesday 7/6/05: Pomona, CA**

 

Pete woke up sweaty. Bus bunks weren’t really meant to be shared, even by two scrawny rockers - Mikey’s long arms were all over the place, the sheet was wrapped around both of them like a straightjacket, and Pete was pressed hard into the wall. There was also a lot of… touching, going on, between the two of them. Mikey’s mouth was open and a silvery thread of spit connected him to Pete’s bare shoulder. It was either sort of sweet or sort of gross. He pushed Mikey’s hair back out of his eyes with two fingers.

He’d been waking up here lately.

This, whatever it was, didn’t start definitively between them. More like, it had always been there, and it finally became noisy enough that they couldn’t ignore it. They weren’t in love, thank god. Pete was keenly aware of his own tendency to fall for people too hard and too fast, people he didn’t even _know_ , and he was disarmed by how grateful he was that for a whole host of reasons, he didn’t and couldn’t love Mikey. He hadn’t said as much, out loud, because it seemed sort of rude even if he was pretty sure they were on the same page about it. Some dark, guilty corner of his mind worried that maybe they weren’t.

Pete was used to people wanting him for a one-night stand. He was grown up enough to admit, though, that he knew why people didn’t keep him around after that. He was difficult and jealous and flaky, he played his feelings close to the vest, he could never commit to going all in with somebody and he could never really let them go. He had a half-dozen voicemails from Jeanae on his phone that he hadn’t listened to but he was willing to bet would attest to just that fact.

And then there was Mikey. He was a friend first, yeah, and he was… Certain other things that weren’t typically Pete’s speed, for all his posturing and coy one-liners in Out magazine. Pete rolled onto his side and the string of drool connecting him to Mikey broke and left a damp spot on the pillow instead.

Mikey looked different in the mornings, his hair a mess of dried gel and dandruff, myopic eyes oddly small without their glasses. He awoke without any fuss, blinking slowly and smiling at Pete before flexing against him. They were both naked. Pete wished it was still dark.

“Hello,” Mikey said sleepily. He pulled Pete closer and kissed the corner of his mouth. They both tasted mossy and rotten, and the whole bus reeked of unshowered guy sweat and what Frank called the band’s “armpit problem.” Pete kissed him back with a fierceness that surprised himself. But Pete kissed like he fought or he fucked, like he had something to prove. He kissed down Mikey’s jaw to his throat and sucked a bruise into the pale skin of his chest.

“Good morning,” he said, muffled in the hollow of Mikey’s throat. “I gotta get back before they notice I’m gone.” He started untangling his legs from the sheet, hoping he’d come across some of his clothes in the process.

“You know,” Mikey said, lounging back and not helping at all. “You could just tell them. Like, you’re already basically out.”  

Pete rolled his eyes. He located a pair of nondescript navy blue boxer briefs that could’ve belonged to either of them and stuck one leg into it. “I can’t possibly be out, Mikey, I’m not gay.”

“Bi, then. Open to… Open-minded. You’re like, definitely not straight though.”

Pete glared at him and hitched the boxers up. “They’re gonna freak out if I’m not there. They’re kind of gonna freak out worse if they think I’m having some kind of, like, gay crisis affair.” He winced at his own word choice. “Like… no offense.”

“Right. Whatever.” Mikey rolled over and didn’t seem bothered when one of his bony feet caught Pete in the solar plexus.

“Hey, dude, fuck, don’t take it like that.” Pete dropped his t-shirt and crawled clumsily back to the head of the bed, banging both his elbows on the bunk walls in the process. “I’m not embarrassed to be here. I mean. Fuck, everybody on this bus definitely knows, right? Just.” He kissed Mikey’s frowning mouth. “It’s like… Complicated.” He kissed him again. “They all think I’m this time bomb, kind of, and they’re all waiting for me to do something dangerous and stupid, basically.” He wriggled down next to Mikey and pressed their noses together. “And if I go in there and tell them about this, they’re gonna go, like, ‘That’s what we’ve been waiting for, Pete’s too fucked up to be here, tour’s cancelled.’”

Mikey smiled but there was no joy behind it. Pete curled his hand around Mikey’s hip and squeezed while he kissed him.

“It comes from, you know, a place of love, or whatever. Just hold out a little bit.” He punctuated it with a kiss. “Okay?”

“Yeah… okay.” Mikey turned his head away and stared at the bunk ceiling. “It’s not like I want to be, you know, your boyfriend.” He snorted and his nose crinkled up. “I don’t like lying. And like, those guys are my friends, too.” He turned back to Pete, his mouth set in a serious line. “I don’t like feeling like somebody’s dirty secret.”

He didn’t sound like he expected a response.

Pete peeled the sheets off both of them and settled back on his knees in the limited space. “I can probably spare like fifteen minutes before I really have to haul ass over there.” He shouldered Mikey’s legs apart. “Just saying.”

“Well.” Mikey laced his fingers together behind his head and hooked one skinny calf over Pete’s shoulder. “If you’re trying to make it up to me, that’s not a bad place to start.”

 

**Friday 7/8/05: Boise, ID**

 

It was the sort of midwestern summer heat that made the asphalt look wavy, like an oil-slick rainbow. Joe leaned back against the bus, in the shade of their little convoy of vehicles all stopping for supplies. Patrick was a mirage in the distance. He was walking toward the outlet mall Target with Justin in some sort of sideburn-wearing frozen food militia. Patrick had half-heartedly invited Joe with them and Joe had made a bad joke about working on his farmer tan, like it was all okay. It probably was okay, Joe was probably overreacting, like always. Right?

Pete leaned up against the bus next to Joe, pulling him out of his thoughts. He smelled like layers of sweat and deodorant and cheetos, the sleeves of his hoodie tugged down over his hands even though it had to be pushing a hundred degrees out. Joe couldn’t bring himself to say he wanted to be alone. He hadn’t seen Pete around much, even though they practically lived on top of each other, and as stupid as it sounded, he kinda missed him.

“Hey, Duck Hunt,” Pete said, and knocked the side of his head against Joe’s shoulder. He looked tired. The dark circles under his eyes were definitely part sweat mixed with the remnants of last night’s eyeliner, but the bruised, purple-blue tint underneath seemed real. Joe wondered how many hours of sleep Pete had even gotten since the tour started.

“What’s up?” Joe said. It was lame, it sounded lame in his head even before he said it, but he wasn’t Andy so he was no good at the silent reassurance thing and he wasn’t Patrick so he didn’t have the telepathic soulmate Vulcan mindmeld connection going for him either. He had a summer of chauffeuring Pete around and a band they’d conceived together and a handful of years being something akin to brothers, but he guessed that didn’t amount to much in the communication department. Brothers didn’t really talk feelings, unless, you know, you were Gerard and Mikey. He tilted his head to the side, trying to nudge Pete the way Pete was always doing, but he overestimated the distance and knocked into him a little too hard. “Fuck. Sorry.”

Pete laughed, and Joe tried to pay attention to it around the way his head hurt now. It sounded real, as far as he could tell. “Cool it, Troh.” Pete blinked and settled his head back on Joe’s shoulder. “I’m kind of not equipped to protect you from yourself, you know.”

It was a weird thing to say, but Pete was weird the same way Joe was lame, and Pete had all these grand delusions about being a role model for Patrick and Joe despite the fact that it usually felt like the other way around. Like, Joe had finally cleaned up that puddle of Mountain Dew on the table in the bus after Pete left it for over a week to congeal into a sticky yellow Rorschach inkblot that made everything smell like old candy. And Patrick… Well, Patrick didn’t really need a role model, because he may have lived on hot pockets and slept through the daylight hours almost every day, but he had that divine spark, that fingerprint touch of genius that made you want to leave him be, just to see what he’d come up with. And maybe he couldn’t hold his liquor or remember important events like kissing his friend in a pretty unambiguously romantic way, but it didn’t make him any less brilliant. That was the unfortunate thing.

It made you want to be around him but scared to interfere.

All that seemed like kind of a mouthful so Joe said “I’m okay, Pete,” instead.

Pete turned his face against Joe’s shoulder and “mmph’d” around his t-shirt. “Good.”

The parking lot simmered. Off in the distance Joe could see Frank and Gerard looking moody and stalwartly gothy under the shade of one of the mall’s decorative trees, both drinking periodically from plastic water bottles. Pete crowded in against Joe and scribbled something stupid on his neck with one of the mini-Sharpies they all had hanging from their tour laminates, and got a hand in his hair and tugged, all restless affection. This was the sort of energy Pete used to expend on Joe a long time ago, before Patrick was in the band, in the brief, sepia-toned moment when Joe had been his golden ticket all full of brilliant ideas.

Joe didn’t like to think about that, because it honestly still stung, even if he was man enough to admit that Patrick was a better composer.

“Not to, like, belabor the point,” Joe started, and Pete looked up and hooked his chin on Joe’s shoulder, even though it was kind of a stretch. “But is this one of those situations where you, you know, check on somebody else because you kind of, I don’t know, need somebody to check on you?” He didn’t need to look at Pete to know he’s frowning. “Just, like, is everything good with you, dude?” He finishes. Par for the course, it sounds pretty lame. “I haven’t seen you around much lately is all.”

The air was humid and thick and the moment hung on the two of them like a wet sheet, palpable in the heat. Pete shifted against Joe’s shoulder. He opened his mouth like he might for once in his life have a normal conversation with Joe about what’s going on.

Of course that’s when Patrick came back, Justin on his heels, and they had a grocery cart between them full of the same gross frozen stuff they’d all been living on for years of touring. Justin held up a box and made a face. Dirty wandered over and snapped a couple of pictures with one of Pete’s disposable cameras, tongue between his teeth.

Patrick’s face was mostly in shadow from the brim of his hat, but two circles of deep red burned high on his pale cheeks, from the sun or the heat or something else. Joe allowed himself a brief fantasy, that Patrick’s blush was an effect of their immediate proximity, but he quashed the feeling when he recognized how badly he wanted it to be true. He indulged himself, though, and let the image of that ruddy flush imprint on his retinas so that when he closed his eyes there were two perfect blots of dusky maroon behind his eyelids.

 

**Tuesday 7/12/05: Vancouver, BC**

 

It probably didn’t seem like anything was wrong, to anybody who didn’t know them. And even to the people who did, it was hard to define what was off. You could hardly go up to Joe and say, “Hey, you’re being extra nice to Patrick, do you hate him?” But when Patrick fucked up the weird Canadian money at the Circle K, Joe didn’t even rag on him before handing over a few bills out of his own wallet.

Of course, Patrick had said “thank you” without getting indignant about how he would’ve figured it out eventually, even though he _definitely_ would have, so it wasn’t like he was being particularly normal either. So he couldn’t even enjoy his off-brand Canadian chips because underneath the grease and salt he could taste an undercurrent of Joe being maybe mad at him, and it made him nauseous, so he gave the rest of the bag to Pete who was looking tired and underfed anyway.

The fact of the matter was, he should have just said something the next day. He could have headed it off at the pass. He’d rolled out of bed the day after the fourth of July and taken a long, acid-yellow, dehydrated piss and thought about how to handle it, and all this smart stuff had occurred to him then: that it was an opportunity to broach the topic, that he could laugh it off easy if Joe was being weird. He had worked out a best case scenario while he washed his hands, that consisted approximately of two minutes of surprisingly fluid conversation and then some sort of mutual romantic revelation involving discrete handjobs while Pete and Andy were still asleep. He had it all planned out. But his goddamn cowardly knee-jerk reaction, when he saw Joe the next morning, was to pretend like he remembered nothing. They’d been quietly avoiding each other ever since.

He couldn’t go back on it now, right? It was way too late for that.  

But they’d been ignoring it for a week and it hadn’t gotten any better, or any less awkward, and he’d begun to suspect that even his worst case scenario - Joe freaking out and trying to force Patrick out of the band, or quitting, himself - would’ve been easier to deal with. At least there would be actions to take - contracts to nullify, or lawyers to contact, or begging and apologies and, like, martyr-ish things to do. Anything was better than stewing. Patrick didn’t much relish the idea of all those apologies - he _hated_ being embarrassed, hated people seeing him cry, which he was willing to bet he would do if he had to live through the worst case scenario, but he hated the idea of Joe hating him more.

He was going to have to do something. Maybe he could just _tell_ Joe that he’d known what he was doing - or, rather, that he hadn’t completely meant to kiss him then but he’d wanted to, he was beginning to realize, for a long time. Years, maybe. And if Joe didn’t feel comfortable with that he could lie and say “don’t worry, dude, I got it out of my system, turns out your mouth is pretty gross and may have ruined men for me forever,” and they could laugh about it in a few weeks when the wound scabbed over.

It _would_ be a lie, though, and maybe that’s why he couldn’t do it. He didn’t like lying to Joe. He didn’t like lying at all. He wasn’t Pete.

Patrick was debating all this for the seventh time that morning over a bowl of Frosted Flakes. Trust Andy to be blunt when it mattered.

“Why’s Joe acting like he killed your dog?” he asked, pouring himself onto the couch beside Patrick.

Patrick kept his face neutral. “He’s not.”

“Dude, he’s grovelling.” Andy shut off the TV and stared at Patrick. “I’ve seen Joe bend over backwards because he feels guilty and it’s never been this bad so like. What’d he do.”

Patrick rolled his eyes. “ _He_ didn’t do anything.” Immediately he wished he hadn’t said it. The emphasis was there, Andy was too smart not to pick up on it.

“Ohhh, so _you_ fucked up and you’re like. Letting Joe blame himself for it. That’s… Pretty harsh, dude. Even for you.” Andy was looking at him the way he might look at a particularly unsavory slab of raw meat. “What’d you do to him?”

“Nobody did anything, just drop it.” Patrick could feel his face getting red, the way it did when he was angry or embarrassed or guilty. He was all three, so it was anybody’s guess what shade he’d turned.

“Whatever, you don’t have to tell me anything, just like. It’s not my place to tell you his personal shit, but you know, he does have some personal shit going on right now. And he seems pretty cut up about whatever, you know, did or didn’t happen. So if he did something shitty you could cut him some slack. And if _you_ did something shitty, like… You are really being a jackass right now.” Andy cleared his throat. “And that’s all I have to say on the matter, and I’m gonna let you handle it like the grownass adult you’re supposed to be.”

Patrick swallowed. Andy was already up and gone, out the bus doors to wherever it is he wanted to be, far away from any awkward conversations about band dynamics and feelings. Patrick envied him his uncomplicated approach to relationships. As far as he could tell, Andy didn’t really _do_ relationships at all. He got laid plenty, and he had lots friends, but never the twain shall meet. Oh, to be as well adjusted - or emotionally constipated, depending on your view of things - as Andy Hurley. Patrick slumped down on the couch and groaned.

The thing to do, he guessed, would be to apologize to Joe and hope it got better. He felt queasy thinking about what Andy had said, that Joe was grovelling, that Joe felt guilty for what had happened. Especially since Joe had really looked out for him that night.

He fully intended to go beg forgiveness after the show, but by the time he’d gotten through the mob of friends and fans and hangers-on, Joe was gone. He checked the bus - not just their bus, but the Motion City bus and the Academy bus because sometimes Joe liked to jam with Sisky, and he knew the Butcher from way back when, but nobody knew anything. Justin, bless him, hopped off the Motion City bus and said he’d take a look around, since the festival grounds were so big. Patrick felt a warm surge of gratitude. That was just the kind of dude Justin was.

When he did finally find Joe he was sitting out by the edge of the field, his knees drawn up to his chest, fiddling with his phone. He didn’t acknowledge Patrick when he sat down. just kept his eyes on the tree line out past the edge of the field.

“So, uh,” Patrick started. “Can we, like, talk?”

Joe kept his eyes level. He blinked once, slowly, like a cat. Patrick was almost fed up with waiting for a response when Joe spoke, his voice a rusty croak from where his mouth was pressed to his forearm. “I have to go catch a plane, dude.”

“What?” Bewildered, Patrick tried to move into Joe’s unwavering line of sight. “What are you talking about?”

“Casey’s like… Casey’s dead.” Another one of those slow blinks. It was disquietingly calm. “I’m gonna go to the funeral, and Toro’s on standby to play for you guys on Thursday, and I’ll be back after that.” He turned his head, finally meeting Patrick’s eye, his expression lifeless and bored. “If you still want to talk then that’s fine but I kind of, like, can’t. Right now.”

“Okay.” Patrick put out a tentative hand and rubbed a slow, deep circle into Joe’s back. “Okay.” They sat like that for a few minutes, and it was almost normal except that it wasn’t at all. Casey was one of Joe’s old friends from Chicago, from his old high school, and while Patrick hadn’t been close with Casey the way Joe had, he’d met him. He’d given him rides and crashed in his basement and generally liked the guy. Patrick thought, vaguely, that it was a little early in their lives to be getting this sort of news about old friends.

He didn’t ask what happened, and when Pete walked up and tugged Joe to his feet and walked him over to the lot with the crew’s cars, Patrick didn’t say goodbye. But he kept sitting there, watching them go. Pete had a strong arm around Joe’s waist. Joe looked small to Patrick, like a gust of wind might bowl him over. He watched the distant shapes of Pete putting Joe in the passenger’s seat of a truck, then climbing in the driver’s side, and pulling out.

He was confronted, slowly, with the fact that Pete and Joe had known each other a lot longer than Patrick had known either of them. Pete called Joe his brother in ways that implied all the torture Joe had suffered at his hands when they were younger, but also a stalwart commitment to each other that went without saying. Of course he’d drive him to the airport alone, and if Joe sat in the passenger seat and cried, Pete would pretend he didn’t notice. That’s what family did for each other. The twin pinpoints of the red brake lights shrank and disappeared from view.

 

**Thursday 7/16/05: Calgary, ALB**

 

Patrick learned most of the details of what had happened, bizarrely, from Ray. He’d spent most of their Wednesday off on the My Chem bus going over their setlist, checking in with Pete and Andy from time to time at rest stops or over text. It wasn’t as though they hadn’t played a show with a stand-in before - the England shows while Pete was in the hospital were still a fresh, painful memory in everyone’s minds - but Joe’s absence left Patrick feeling wrong-footed, the way a familiar setting in a dream is slightly but unignorably different.

Ray said he guessed some guy back in Chicago had died of a heroin overdose and his mom had called Joe’s mom, and Joe had dropped everything to go to the funeral. Ray said it was the right thing to do, like he knew exactly how to handle that sort of situation. Which Patrick guessed he probably did.

To his credit, Ray was chill as hell. He nailed the songs on the first try more often than not, and joked with Patrick in between songs, and didn’t give him any shit for checking his phone all the time even though it was probably annoying. Patrick didn’t _expect_ to hear from Joe, but he wanted to.

“I don’t have to do those, like, spin kicks right?” Ray asked, noodling around on the chorus of “Reinventing the Wheel.”

“Not unless you want to.” Patrick tried to match his riff the way he would with Joe but he fumbled and dropped his pick. Ray was a lot faster than anyone in their band.

“Good.” He leaned back and started another, easier passage. “I don’t have Trohman’s stamina, I’d throw out my back halfway through the set and then you’d be stuck with Frankie.”

Frank leered around the wall of his bunk at them. “How ‘bout it?”

Patrick chucked an empty soda can at him and he retreated. That’s how it was with the My Chem guys. He was suddenly, unshakably glad to have them around. He wasn’t seeing much of Mikey on the bus but nobody seemed to find that strange, and nobody was acknowledging the fact that Pete had been spending his nights crammed into Mikey’s bunk doing whatever it is they were doing. Patrick figured everybody had to know - there were some things you couldn’t help learning about each other when you were packed into a glorified tin can together for weeks on end, and who was boning who, and when, was definitely one. Patrick figured they all thought he wasn’t supposed to know, so they were being careful.

Or maybe it just didn’t matter to them because it was Mikey’s business, and Pete’s, and nobody else’s. Patrick should take a lesson.

The Calgary show went off better than anyone had expected. All the My Chem guys sat on the side of the stage and cheered and the audience went wild when Ray took a solo in “Sugar” and another in “Calm Before the Storm.” Pete tornadoed around the stage like he could make up for all Joe’s missed reckless energy, nearly careening off the front more than once. He called Mikey up to play bass during “Saturday,” turning it into an extended FOB/MCR jam complete with Frank and Gerard doing an exaggerated slow dance together in front of Patrick’s amp stack.

When they finally tumbled off the stage Ray and Frank wrapped Patrick up in a sweaty, pretty disgusting but completely necessary bear hug. He thanked Ray profusely, repeatedly, and hugged him again because he deserved it. The My Chem faction broke off to get ready for their own show, and Patrick, in the newfound spirit of minding his own goddamn business, pointedly tried not to notice how Pete and Mikey didn’t touch or say goodbye to each other after the show.

He checked his phone back at the bus, more out of habit than anything, but there was a text from Joe waiting for him. _“heading to the airport. howd it go?”_

Patrick swallowed. What he wanted to say, in all honesty, was “I missed you.” But that seemed stupid. _“we did good but its better w u. see u soon”_

Joe texted him back a picture of his sneakers on the unmistakeable pattern of the carpet at O'Hare International Airport.

 

 **Saturday 7/23/05: Chicago, IL**  


Andy was getting pretty fucking tired of cleaning up after everybody.

Okay, that wasn’t entirely fair, especially since Joe had taken Andy’s overflowing bag of dirty laundry back to his apartment and washed it without being asked. When Andy tried to thank him he’d just said, “you fucking reek, Hurley,” and that was that. And Joe had had, you know, a bit of a rough summer so far, all things considered, so he wasn’t mad about keeping an eye on him from time to time. He was sick of Pete, if he was going to be honest.

They were in Chicago, they’d driven straight there after the last night’s concert, and when the bus had pulled in off the highway and they’d gotten their first glimpse of familiar skyline Pete had shouted “Fuck! Yes!” and pumped his fist in the air like a complete fucking homesick loser. He and Joe and Patrick were excited about the idea of “playing a home game” despite the fact that they’d been killing it all tour, that they hardly needed an infusion of devoted fans to get a good audience reaction. Besides, as much time as he’d spent bumming around Chicago with Pete as a kid, it had never, ever been _home_ to him. He was probably just jealous. He was probably the homesick loser, really.

Fucking Pete.

On top of that, there was drama afoot, and Andy couldn’t stand drama. That morning he’d stalwartly pretended not to hear Pete and Mikey’s whispered argument from the back room of the bus where he’d been stashed up with a stack of comic books, but it was no use. Pete was crap at keeping his voice down.

“I just figured it wouldn’t be a big deal!” Pete’s whisper was closer to a yell.

“Dude, you dumped me via note, while I was asleep, halfway through a tour we’re co-headlining. Like I’m all for avoiding collateral damage but could you be more of a fucking drama queen?” Mikey wasn’t even trying to keep quiet. Andy could practically see his eye-roll through the door.

“Would you -” Scuffling noises, like Pete was trying to get his hands over Mikey’s mouth. “Be discreet, man, nobody knows!”

Andy nearly snorted. _Everyone_ knew. Maybe not Joe, Joe was more oblivious than your average coma patient, but he and Patrick definitely knew, and Charlie and Dirty _absolutely_ knew because Andy had paid them to keep it as quiet as possible once the rumors started to spread. So much for that investment.

He’d stuck his headphones in and drowned the rest of the conversation out with Anthrax and a stack of Hellcat back-issues and when Pete had come in a half hour later, trying very hard to look like he hadn’t been crying, Andy had just raised one arm and let Pete crawl under it and go to sleep. It was a lot of work being an Andy when there was a Pete around.

Joe and Patrick had gone home the previous night to sleep in real, honest-to-god _beds_ , and for Joe to do all the aforementioned laundry, bless his heart, so it had been lonely on the bus, even with Pete and his drama. Even so, when Patrick invited Andy out to get some conscientiously vegan-friendly food and hit a couple of record stores, he declined and retreated back to the privacy of the back room. He was annoyed at Patrick, too, and it wasn’t Patrick’s fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. They were kids - and they were dumb, on top of that - and it could hardly be held against them. Andy was just sick of being everybody’s concerned auntie.

He hadn’t technically _known_ for very long. A few days ago, in Salt Lake City, of all places, Joe had finally given him the gory details. But Andy was pretty sure he’d sort of known longer even than Joe or Patrick had. He’d probably known since he got into the van with them four years ago and saw the way Joe had looked all doe-eyed at Patrick while they played competing riffs in the backseat, and how Patrick had fallen asleep with his cheek pressed into Joe’s shoulder and his arm across his waist like it was the most comfortable thing in the world, even if he’d complained about tweaking his neck the next day. But at the time he’d figured it’d either resolve itself in some harmless teenage necking or fade through the years as they both more or less wore themselves into well-traveled channels of bland heterosexuality. Until Joe had accidentally outed himself in Las Cruxes, that’s what he’d assumed had happened.

So yeah, he’d _known_ , but he hadn’t known the relevant details about why they were both acting so bent-out-of-shape about it until recently, and he was equal parts disinterested and pissed off.

Of course, Joe was under the impression that his feelings for Patrick were some sort of new development and had actually said the words “you may want to sit down for this” before spilling his guts. Christ, Andy was in a band full of clueless idiots who couldn’t keep a straight face to save their lives. It was fucked up, that was for sure, but it wasn’t nearly as fucked up as Joe seemed to think it was, and Andy lost track of the number of times he’d said, in tones of increasing frustration, “Just _talk to him about it_ ” only to have Joe give some wishy-washy excuse about how he didn’t want Patrick to get mad at him.

“Dude,” Andy had said, finally, “Didn’t he already like, try to talk to you about it? Doesn’t that kind of make it your turn?”

There was a way that Joe frowned sometimes, just the corners of his mouth tucking down, that erased all the lingering childishness from his face for a moment. It kind of freaked Andy out. He did it then, that little, grown-up frown, and said, “Yeah but I told him to talk to me again when I got back if he still thought we needed to. And he didn’t. So, like, he doesn’t. Think we need to, I mean.”

Andy pinched the bridge of his nose under his glasses. He was getting a  headache.

“I just don’t want to like, force him to relive a moment he’s obviously not like, enthusiastic about remembering.”

Andy had shut his eyes and counted to ten, he was so tired of that line of logic. “Okay, sure, but like, what about you?”

“What _about_ me?”

Jesus, nobody could take a hint.

“I’m not trying to put words in your mouth or anything but you’ve basically been in love with him since he verbally assaulted you in a Borders, and I don’t want it to fuck up the band or anything but - and don’t you dare repeat this or acknowledge that I said this again, but you’ve grown up a lot since we got in the van and even though you’re an absolute dumbass about, you know, pretty much everything, I trust you not to ruin my career with your gay revelation.”

That shut Joe right up.

“Basically you should just cowboy up and like. Put yourself out there. And if he’s a jerk about it you can watch me gut-punch him and we’ll all laugh about it in six months even if we have to deal with some kinda awkward shit for a little while. Right? Just like, follow your…” He gestured. “Your dick. Er, your heart. Whatever.”

Joe had blushed a truly impressive shade of marinara sauce red and excused himself, and they hadn’t talked about it since but Andy got the impression Joe hadn’t made any progress with following whatever part of his anatomy dictated his whole Patrick thing. Which was annoying, but Andy was still placated by the clean (and folded!) clothes at the foot of his bunk. And Patrick could share the blame for all these stalls and starts, and he was certainly avoiding close physical proximity to Joe which was 1. rude and 2. impractical when they were all living in a pretty fucking small vehicle. So Andy was annoyed with Patrick.

And Pete.

And probably Mikey Way, even though it seemed like he was getting a bit of a raw deal. He should have known better. It was always better to grow out of your inevitable crush on Pete as early as possible, or figure out a way to fit him into your life that didn’t involve getting lanced with the shards of his own exploding bullshit feelings.

Andy had a headache.

The show was great, but all the shows were great. This one was mainly great because Mixon had driven down from Milwaukee and was waiting for him by the side of the stage when he got off.

“Still not ready to come back to Seven Angels, play some real music?” Matt punched him in the arm. They walked the festival grounds, ignoring the crowds, comforted and contented by one another’s presence in that way that only very old, very dear friends can be.

“Don’t tempt me, Mixon, I’m still tryin’ to make some actual money.” Andy pulled his sweaty hair back off his neck with a stretched out elastic. “You wouldn’t believe this tour. I need, like, a year-long nap.”

“Yeah? Let me guess - it’s your Pete thing.”

Andy shoved him. Given the fact that Matt had nearly a foot on him, height-wise, it didn’t do much good. “I wish it was just that. I don’t wanna fuckin… I mean, I’ve done so much talking about it that if I never thought about it again it’d be too soon. Let’s go to that Vietnamese place with the…” He made an obscure hand gesture.

Matt knew the one. He was parked pretty close to the Tweeter Center entrance and they were on the road before the post-show exhaustion had even set in. Andy leaned against the car window, shut his eyes, and thanked a god he’d never believed in for small miracles and Matt Mixon. If home were a person then yeah, he’d played a home game tonight.

 

**Tuesday 7/26/05: Buffalo, NY**

 

Sometimes Pete thought of Andy as this vast, unknowable desert. Like he was beautiful and terrible and featureless, like he was someplace you could get lost and never find your way back out. It didn’t used to be like that, when they were kids, still. Pete figured he was one of the only people around, besides Mixon, who’d seen Andy _drunk_ and still knew him. Sometimes it was weird to know this Andy was the same guy who Pete used to huff paint with in the back of his car, who used to pick fights with bigger guys just for something to do, who always had Pete’s back but was always ready to punch him in the face, if he needed it. He wondered if Andy remembered what it was like to be that person. He looked at the way Andy was limned in evening light from the bus window, the bright screen from his phone reflecting a sharp square onto his glasses, and how at peace he was, and he almost hoped not.

He’d saved Andy, or Andy had saved him, back then. Maybe both. Probably both. It didn’t seem fair that Andy kept having to do it, though, when Pete could hardly return the favor anymore.

“Hey, Hurley,” he said.

Andy didn’t look up but he hummed a little, his voice vaulting up like a question.

“I love you, man.”

“I know.”

Pete waited a beat, but Andy still hadn’t looked up. “Did you seriously just Princess Leia me?”

“Mm-hmm.” Andy was still reading something on his phone, but in a moment he flipped it shut and finally looked at Pete. “You okay?”

Pete sighed and flopped dramatically back on his bunk. “Why do people keep asking me that?”

For a minute Pete didn’t think Andy was going to answer. Andy got up and made himself busy looking through his bag, not looking at Pete, ignoring the question or choosing his words carefully. It was very like Andy to take a long time to answer a question, an awkward social convention, to be sure. It was one of the things that made people find Andy off-putting when they first met him. He emerged from the bag eventually with a toothbrush, triumphant. “Maybe because you’re either crazy psyched about nothing or pulling this hyper-sentimental weird shit.” He wetted the toothbrush under the tap and squeezed a glob of toothpaste onto it. “And I mean, I know it’s like, an off-the-table topic of conversation, but it sorta freaks people out when you start saying things that sound like goodbyes.” He stuck the toothbrush in his mouth and went to work on his back molars.

Suitably chastened, Pete rolled onto his other side. “It’s not like, off-the-table.” He waited for Andy’s answer, but none came. “I’m okay, dude.”

Andy removed the toothbrush and said around the mouthful of toothpaste foam, “Well do you want to talk about it?”

“I mean. Not really.”

“Then it’s off the table.” Andy went back to his dental hygiene and Pete rolled onto his back.

He was basically ready for everyone to either commit to pretending it hadn’t happened - quit with all the babying and the _looks_ and the thinking they were being sneaky keeping an eye on him when they absolutely fucking weren’t - or just yell at him and get it over with. It seemed really fucking melodramatic in retrospect. He’d been crying and sort of greying out when he’d called Bob, and he didn’t remember much about how they got him out of his car and to the hospital, but he remembered the raw feeling his throat had the next day after they’d crammed a tube down it and how Andy had shown up without him asking, and looked pretty furious, and taken care of everything. Fuck, Andy had called Ryan and Brendon and chilled them out, and Andy hated talking on the phone. It was stupid but at the time it seemed like if Andy still wanted to go to bat for him, maybe he was worth something after all.

So like, the fact that Andy had been holding him at arm’s length for months now kind of ached and kind of voided all their history. Pete knew Patrick wouldn’t leave him because they were the same, symbiotic, a binary star. And Joe wouldn’t leave him because they were family, it was that simple. Andy was his variable, his oldest friend who he was somehow still trying to win over. He was exhausted.

Pete sort of really wanted Andy to yell at him, because he deserved it and maybe if they got it out of the way they could go back to how it was before.

When Andy came back through to the bunks dressed in pajama pants and a faded t-shirt, Pete pulled the curtain back from his bunk.

“C’mere.”

Even at their most distant times it was still such a relief, honestly, to have an Andy in his life, who would vault up into the bunk and lay down next to him even though it was crowded and not say anything, just wait. Their shoulders and arms touched, and nearly their hips, and Pete could remember dozens, hundreds of nights pressed up against Andy in the back of the van or, if they were lucky, some generous friend-of-a-friend’s couch or twin bed. He slung his arm over Andy’s chest and pushed his nose into his neck, like a dog.

“It’s not gonna happen again, okay?”

Andy pinched the bridge of his nose, unsettling his glasses, before removing them entirely and turning to nose through Pete’s hair. “Yeah,” he said against Pete’s temple. “Okay.”

Maybe if Andy was a desert, Pete was a strong wind that hurricaned over him and changed his topography. Maybe if Andy was a granite cliff face, Pete was an ocean that beat against it until it eroded away. Maybe they were an unstoppable force and an immovable object. Maybe they were just a couple of fucked up guys who’d known each other too long not to need each other, sometimes, like this. Andy put a hand on the back of Pete’s neck and held on tight.

There had been a Racetraitor tour a little while after they’d both gone seriously edge, after Andy had gotten his tattoos for it, when Pete had been sure something might happen between them. They’d gotten stranded in some podunk town in Ohio and ended up staying in the storage room of the club they had played that night, all five of them camped out on the floor, and Pete had spooned back against Andy, felt Andy wind his fingers into Pete’s dreads, press his nose against the back of his neck. They were so much closer then than they were now, he thought, even with Andy pushing him over to hold him the same way. Things changed, he guessed, and they had been so entirely on the same page back then, in a way they just weren’t anymore. Pete had given himself over to a scene that craved him, that validated him and his words and his feelings. Andy had further espoused the values they both used to hold close. Pete stilled on the edge of the dizzying gap between past and present, and focused on Andy’s fingers gripping his hair in the back and his chest pressed up against him.  

Andy wrapped his arm over Pete’s chest and stayed like that, entirely still, too warm to be stone. “We’re having a moment, okay?” he said against the nape of Pete’s neck. “So just. Like. Try to remember this if you feel that way again.”

“You spooning me in my bed?” Pete snorted. “Hurley, I’ve got, like, a million nights like this in the vault.” He tapped the side of his head.

Andy smiled against his neck and dragged him closer. “No, jackass, remember that I’m a whole lot stronger than you and I’ll kick your ass if you ever scare me like that again.” His arm tightened around Pete’s chest. “Got it?”

“Yeah, yeah, I love you too.” Pete turned around in Andy’s arms. He could fall asleep like this, easy. “Get the fuck outta here before I lose all my cred.”

Andy slipped from Pete’s bunk, ruffling his hair with the sort of casual affection bred from long years of sharing too little space, and wandered off to put himself to bed.

Pete lay awake for a very long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know the details of what went down with Joe's friend OD'ing and I didn't want to pry into back interviews too much for the sake of fanfic so you know, that's as fictionalized as the more obviously fictionalized parts of this obviously fictional story.


	4. How You Make It Sparkle and Glow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here's the one where everybody gets it together. Sort of.

**Thursday 8/4/05: Talahassee, FL**

 

In Florida they crossed paths with Beasley and Joe got his first real tattoo. Andy sat with him and let Joe hang onto his wrist because Joe was a wimp about pain, even though the forearm is about as painless as it gets, tattoo-wise, as Andy reminded him over and over.

“Shut up, dude,” Joe said, and he would’ve smacked Andy in the shoulder if he weren’t trying so fervently to hold still.

Andy leaned his arm up on the table and watched Beasley work. “You’re so brave,” he said, his voice heavy with irony.

Joe rolled his eyes, and winced when the needle skated over the joint of his wrist. “I’m super brave,” he said petulantly. “Braver than you, asshole.”

“Brave enough to tell Patrick you want to jump his bones?”

“Dude!” Joe flushed and cut his eyes at Beasley.

“Not my business,” he murmured, pushing Joe’s arm into a better position and going at the linework with casual grace. “You gotta stop squirming, though.”

“Right.” Joe glared at Andy. “I’m working up to it.” He was, he honestly was. He’d been going over it in his head, figuring he could do it at the end of tour, and if it all went to hell they’d at least have a few weeks when they wouldn’t have to see each other. Trying to sort out what he wanted to say. He had half a page of notes in a Word document on his laptop prepared, so he wouldn’t miss any of the important points.

“You’re working up to it.” Andy snorted. “Okay, so by the time we’re thirty you’ll be ready to go for it. That’s real helpful.”

“I’m gonna do it. I’m going to do it in Boston, so I can hide afterward because it’s gonna go poorly.” Joe tapped the fingers of his free hand on Andy’s wrist. “So get off my back about it, okay, Hurley?”

Andy made a frustrated noise. “Or you could do it now, and it could go great, and you could make me and Pete miserable having to listen to your sloppy makeouts on the bus. There’s a whole world of possibility, Troh.”

Joe turned to the side, watching Beasley work. It was just lines, for now - their stop in Tallahassee wasn’t long enough to finish the damn thing - but it was good. He was pleased despite the pain. Beasley wiped away a slick of ink and blood, and Joe felt queasy enough to not want to watch anymore. He turned back to Andy.

Andy, who was being cagey as hell, lately. Joe sort of wished, all things aside, that he could talk to Patrick about it, because it wasn’t just an Andy thing, it was  _ the Andy and Pete thing _ , which he’d always felt just outside of, this opacity around them that he couldn’t breach. He and Patrick used to be in solidarity on the exterior. Andy had been great, truth be told, to Joe this summer. He was a pain in the ass about Joe’s inertia but he was  _ there _ , wasn’t he? He didn’t judge.

Joe decided, for once in his life, to push his luck. “You’re one to talk, you know,” he said.

Andy raised an eyebrow.

“Your Pete thing.” Joe was mostly making guesses. “You know what I’m talking about.”

It must have worked because Andy paled. “Did Mixon put you up to this?” He looked annoyed, and more than that, he looked sad.

“No, dude, I’m just…” Joe felt bad for bringing it up. He didn’t know if he wanted to know the details anymore, with the way Andy was looking at him. “I just thought you seemed kinda, you know, cut up lately. We don’t have to talk about it.”

“How much do you know?” Andy asked. His mouth was drawn in a tight line. He was tense.

“Nothing, dude,” Joe said truthfully. “Only what I’ve guessed, and that’s not much. Look, we can just drop it.” He held out his unoccupied hand, palm up, in surrender.

“Thanks.” Andy tousled Joe’s hair, and for a while the only sound was the sharp buzz of the needle in Beasley’s hand. “It’s not that I don’t want you to know, I’m just… I’m really, really tired of talking about it.”

“Okay,” Joe said. It maybe hadn’t fully occurred to him before that Andy wasn’t as unattached and laid back as they all made him out to be, and that maybe that opacity that separated him from the stuff he didn’t know about Andy extended further than he’d initially thought. “I mean, I’m here, though. If you want, ever.”

“Yeah, dude, I know.” Andy smiled at him. Joe sort of couldn’t wait for this summer to be over, as wild as it had been.

“Not to, uh, break up the moment,” Beasley said from Joe’s other side. “I’m just about done, though.” He uncapped a tube of Aquaphor and slathered some onto Joe’s arm with a gloved hand before covering it with a square of gauze and taping it down.

At the cash register, he slapped a fresh bottle of Aquaphor into Joe’s hand. “Keep it hydrated, don’t take hot showers, don’t pick at it. And, not for nothing, but tell that guy how you feel. It just gets worse the longer you wait.”

The look Andy gave Joe was smug as anything.

“Don’t think you’re off the hook, Hurley, you’re doing the same damn thing. You just won’t admit it.” He waved them off.

Joe didn’t press, but he couldn’t not laugh.

 

**Tuesday 8/9/05: Virginia Beach, VA**

 

Six days had passed without a night off. They were playing every night straight through to the end of the tour, living on top of each other and in one another’s pockets, and Patrick was starting to go crazy with it. That morning he’d tried to slide past Joe without acknowledging him in the narrow confines of the bus kitchenette but had ended up sandwiched between the wall and Joe’s bare chest, blushing and furious, and had struggled free and locked himself in the back room to sulk and overthink things with a box of Lucky Charms. He dug his hand in and picked out all the marshmallows from a fist full of cereal and ate them one by one, and cursed Joe’s name with each heart, star and horseshoe.

It seemed awfully unfair.

The thing you could usually count on Joe for was that he’d always start the conversation, if one needed to be had. He had outgrown passive aggression earlier than the rest of them, and tended to just speak his mind when he thought it mattered. It was one of the reasons Patrick found him so easy to get along with - infuriating, yeah, sometimes, because they didn’t agree on everything and they were both stubborn as hell - but at the very least, Joe prevented the wounds from festering. Until now. And getting down to brass tacks, it was Joe’s turn. Patrick had tried, had gotten his ass kicked into gear and apologized and it hadn’t worked. The ball, as far as Patrick was concerned, was in Joe’s court. The fact that he hadn’t brought it up was, frankly, inconsiderate as hell.

That either meant he didn’t think anything of Patrick’s kissing him - and why should he, really? They’d been drunk; it’d been a weird night; they had an intimate sort of friendship and under certain circumstances those lines might get blurred. But it hadn’t exactly meant  _ nothing _ to Patrick. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe that was why there was no solution. If Joe had anything to say on the matter he would’ve said it weeks ago, but he’d acted exactly as if nothing had changed, and maybe it hadn’t. Maybe Patrick was kidding himself. He stuffed another fistful of cereal into his mouth and coughed on the dust.

It was a really beautiful day, from what he could see through the slatted blinds, and he decided to get away from the bus for a while. Virginia Beach didn’t have much going for it apart from a strong military presence and a chain of alien-themed pizza joints they’d discovered and grown to love on their first tour out to the East coast, but it smelled salty and fragrant from the ocean, and it was big enough that he could lose himself a little.

Joe didn’t seem to be in the bus when Patrick headed out, and he thanked whatever higher power there might be for that small miracle. He beat a path down towards town and let the rhythm of the unfamiliar city overtake him. Joe had gone off and gotten the lines of an ornate half-sleeve done with no warning - and Patrick didn’t want to admit that it made him a little sexy, albeit still infuriating - and if he could do that, Patrick could wander off into his own sort of escapism.

There was a handful of little record shops all relatively near each other that could occupy him, and Patrick caught a lift over to that side of town. He sat in the back with his headphones on and his hood up, reveling in quiet anonymity.

It was in the back section of Vinyl Daze that Patrick saw a familiar face. Or a pair of them, really, only it was hard to tell at first because they were squished up against each other in the comfortable bearing of lovers and their disparate shapes bled into one at the corner of Patrick’s peripheral vision. He wasn’t exactly eavesdropping, but the track on his iPod was quiet and it was easy to overhear, and once he started he couldn’t stop.

“You’re beautiful, you know.” That smug voice was immediately and conspicuously recognizable.

Patrick cut his eyes to the side and thumbed down the volume on his iPod. Frank was lounging back beside the rack of old Rock ‘n’ Roll comics, his eyes at an intimate half-mast. Without his stage makeup he always looked younger, more boyish, childish almost.

“I’m geeking out over a badly drawn comic about The Cure, dude.” Frank’s companion had an incredulous Jersey drawl; it was unmistakably Gerard, whose back was to Patrick. He resisted the urge to stare.

“I know,” Frank said. His voice was still threaded with flattery. “I can’t wait to get back home with you.” He detached himself from the wall and came to stand by Gerard, and now that both their backs were turned, Patrick allowed himself more of a look.

It was bewildering, because anyone who’d seen as many MCR shows as Patrick incidentally had was familiar with the sight of Frank and Gerard kissing. Yet this innocent gesture, Frank lacing his fingers with Gerard’s and bringing his hand up to kiss each of his knuckles, had Patrick blushing, his heart racing with the fervor of a voyeur.

“You’re fuckin’ weird,” Gerard said. He sounded, Patrick noted, radiantly happy.

“I love you too,” Frank murmured. He slid his other hand up to cup Gerard’s cheek and tilted his face down to kiss him, with none of the violence and inelegance that Patrick associated with them kissing. It was soft, closed-mouthed and brief. It was the kind of kiss, Patrick reflected, that parents shared. It was comfortable.

He’d never felt more intrusive. The sound of his breathing seemed to fill the room, whooshing and rushing, overtaking the Hawkwind record on the store’s PA, and he knew he had to leave, to let them have their privacy. He stuffed his stack of records back into the bin and turned to leave, and because he was the unluckiest guy on earth, apparently, he tripped over a box of bargain singles and went sprawling. The slap of his palms on the concrete floor and the crash of scattered records rent the friendly ambiance of the shop like a chainsaw.

“Fuck,” Patrick said, distinctly.

He could hear Frank and Gerard arguing behind him, the way Gerard’s voice vaulted up in a panicky babble that made his words indistinguishable, and Frank’s low, soothing tones underneath it.

“Look,” he heard Frank say. “I’ll talk to him.” And jesus, there was a tattooed hand hauling Patrick up by the elbow and tugging him out of the store, into the humid outside, and sitting him down on the curb that circled the parking lot.

They sat there in silence for a moment. Frank took out a pack of cigarettes and shook one out into his hand. He offered it to Patrick, then stuck it in his own mouth when Patrick declined.

“So,” Frank said. He pulled out a lighter and flicked it open, cupping his palm around the flame as he held it to the tip of the cigarette. His cheeks hollowed out when he inhaled. “Are you gonna ruin it for us?”

Patrick sort of wished he’d accepted the cigarette, if only to have something to do with his hands. His fingers drummed on his knees until he willed them, with effort, to stop. “It’s none of my business, man.”

Frank squinted across the parking lot. “No, it isn’t.” He took a long drag on the cigarette.

The sun was reaching the apex of its slow parabola across the sky above them, hot and intense. Patrick’s hands felt sweaty. He wondered if that was it, if Frank was going to ask him for some sort of blood oath or nondisclosure agreement or if they’d settled up already. He felt queasy, and under it there ran a thick current of curiosity. He remembered kissing Joe. He remembered his unsalvageable best case scenario.

“Look don’t hit me okay?” he started, and Frank cut his eyes to the side at him. “I don’t mean to, like…” He struggled for the words. He wished he had Pete’s gregariousness. “I’m not assuming anything, I just don’t have, like, anybody else to ask.”

Frank exhaled a long stream of smoke. “Ah jeez,” he said, and his mouth curled up in a wry smile around his cigarette. “I should get Gee, he’s better at this shit.”

“Please don’t,” Patrick rushed. “I’m gonna pussy out if I don’t just say it okay?”

“Isn’t it kinda misogynist to call it ‘pussying out?’” Frank said, but he made a reluctant, circular motion with one hand that indicated for Patrick to continue.

“Can I just -” Patrick frowned. “What’s it… How do you make it work? You know, with somebody in the band?”

Frank squinted at him. “Pete? I wondered why him and Mikey broke up.”

“No, god!” Patrick rolled his eyes. “It doesn’t really matter who. Just, like, we kissed and now we can’t talk and I think. I mean. I probably love him, or something. Right?”

“Dude, I can’t tell you your feelings.” Frank put the cigarette to his lips again. “I didn’t, like, go for it with Gerard until I was pretty sure I’d have to quit the band if I didn’t. For what it’s worth.”

Patrick put his chin in his hands. “And it worked? Like, everyone’s okay with it?”

“You kidding? You’ve met the band, right?” Frank grinned. “I mean we all just want each other to be happy. If me and Gee broke up we’d still want each other to be happy, and I think we’d still want to, like, be in each other’s lives and make music together and everything.” There was something soft in the set of his mouth, that boyishness returning to his features around the cigarette hanging out of the corner of his lips. “I mean that’s, like, what love is, yeah?”

Patrick mulled it over. “Yeah,” he said, and he clapped a hand on Frank’s shoulder. “Yeah, it is.” He stood up and made to leave. There were only a few days left of tour and he knew he had to do something before time and distance and the distractions of Chicago ruined their shot.

“That’s it?” Frank called out behind him. He was grinding the stub his cigarette into the asphalt.

“I know what I gotta do, yeah. Thanks, man!” Patrick walked quickly toward the main road where he might get a cab back. He broke into a jog and pulled his Sidekick out at the same time, texting Justin with both thumbs. Behind him, he could hear Frank laughing.

 

**Wednesday 8/10/05: Bristow, VA**

 

Pete was always kind of a shitty big brother. He was lousy at advice, and never a very good listener, and he could  _ feel _ himself disappointing Ryan in the same way as they wandered the grounds in the vague direction of the Ernie Ball stage. It had seemed like a cool idea, to arrange for Panic to come out for one show just to relax for a day. A tight coil of pride wound up in Pete’s chest. He’d heard the rough mixes of the album and it was  _ good _ , and he had found them, yeah, but only because they made themselves impossible to ignore, and they’d come up with those songs on their own. Or, Ryan had. Ryan wasn’t saying anything, just looking around at the bustling crews and crowds of restless musicians, the nuts and bolts of a tour like this. Pete wanted to be teaching him how to headline a tour, or how to learn the names of everybody on your crew, or what to do when something went wrong.

Pete didn’t really know how to do any of that, though, and Ryan seemed basically capable of figuring it out when he got to it. They kept walking, slowly, in silence.

“I heard the album,” Pete said, finally. “It’s really good.” He paused. “It’s pretty early to say but I think it’s gonna go places.”

The right side of Ryan’s mouth quirked up in an odd little smile. He was always so expressionless, dead-eyed and nervous. When they’d first started talking Pete had been sure they’d be close friends, and he didn’t know how to handle the fact that it had never really come to fruition.

“Are you guys doing okay? Are you…” He searched for tactful words, and hated himself for it, because nobody ever used anything but tactful words around him anymore and he knew he was sick of it. “Like feel free to tell me to fuck off and mind my own business but are you gonna be okay when you go back to Vegas?” He glanced at Ryan. “With your dad and all?”

Ryan kept his eyes forward. “He’s not so bad most of the time.”

“That’s kind of not what it sounds like on your album, dude…” Pete steered them towards a couple of folding chairs in a patch of shade by the side of the stage. “Like, I just want you to know.” He made himself look Ryan in the eye. This was a good thing he was doing. “I mean, I’m your label head and I’m gonna, like, look after you in that regard but I’m also your friend, man. And if you need a place to stay or you need, like, an advance, to move out or if you think your dad would try rehab again or anything. I mean I don’t want you to think you can’t ask for help with that. You can. You should, if you need it.”

“Thanks.” Ryan wasn’t looking at Pete - he was fretting the torn hem of his t-shirt, widening an already-obvious hole with his fingers. “I’ll be okay. Like, I’ll let you know, I guess. If it gets bad.”

“Okay.” Pete didn’t know what to say. He was a little mad at Ryan, to be honest, for not accepting his offer of help. If Pete was going to square up and admit what he knew to be true, he probably needed to help Ryan more than Ryan needed his help. Ever since he woke up that morning in the hospital with Joe and Patrick and Andy white-faced and shaken in the waiting room, scared to touch him like he would shatter without warning, Pete had just wanted to prove he could be someone people could count on. Like,  _ fuck _ , he was  _ trying _ , wasn’t he?

“Has the tour been good?” Ryan asked. He sounded so damn patient and polite. He probably wanted to go find his friends.

“Kinda,” Pete said. “Sometimes. I dunno, it’s always hard, I guess.”

“How so?”

Pete slid from the folding chair into the dry grass and leaned back on his hands. “Buddy, you don’t want to know,” he said.

Ryan got up and joined Pete on the ground, folding his spindly legs in front of him. “Try me.” In response to Pete’s skeptical eyebrow: “I’m serious! You want to help me escape the, uh, unpleasant realities of what I’m going home to, tell me some tales of tour debauchery. Give me something to look forward to for next year.”

“God. You probably won’t like this, then. You couldn’t pay me to do this summer over.” Pete laughed humorlessly, but he didn’t stop talking - he couldn’t. He sketched out the ups and downs - the fact they’d nearly had to cancel on account of him, the way everyone was treating him like he could combust at any second, the relief he’d felt with Mikey and the guilt and unrest that had followed hot on its heels. Ryan nodded at the appropriate points and squinted out over the dry fairground to give Pete a moment when he started getting worked up.

Pete thought Ryan would probably be a pretty good big brother.

“Anyway,” he said, finally. The little patch of shade they’d been sitting in had shifted a foot to the left, and one half of Ryan’s face was overexposed and pale in the light, his iris a transparent amber, his pupil a pinprick at the center. “Now Hurley’s all weird and that always throws me off.”

“Okay.” Ryan put his palms down flat the dry grass and leaned back on them so his face was back in the shade of the tent. “So what do you want?”

“From Andy?”

“From anybody, I guess.”

Pete gnawed on his bottom lip for a second. “That’s the million dollar question, huh.”

 

**Friday 8/12/05: Camden, NJ**   


 

Andy’d been texting Mixon a lot. Or, maybe that was misleading, because Andy always texted Mixon a lot, but usually it was shit like  _ “Liz Hand’s Boba Fett books are actually pretty good jsyk” _ or  _ “rly in the mood to rewatch dune idk why”  _ \- one-off check-ins that Mixon didn’t necessarily have to answer (but usually did:  _ “me 2 dude lets do a rewatch when u get back - theres this new thai place u gotta try” _ ). More and more, though, they’re having these long, laborious  _ conversations _ . Because Mixon had his best interests at heart, and wasn’t willing to let Andy just deal with things on an emotionally constipated low simmer, even if that was Andy’s preferred method of coping.

“Dude,” Mixon said. His voice sounded crackly and far away on the other end of the phone, and the fact that he’d actually  _ called _ was a testament to how verbose their texting had gotten. “I don’t give a shit what choice you make, but you’ve gotta fall on one side of the fence. Stop being such a fuckin’ emo about it.”

“Hey!” Andy was trying to keep his voice down even though he was squirreled away in the back lounge and everyone else was presumably still asleep. Early mornings were Pete’s domain, though, and it was anyone’s guess whether he was still out or laying awake and alert in his bunk, listening. “I did choose,” he muttered. “I chose to let him deal with it.”

“Hurls.” Mixon sounded gleeful underneath the pity. God, Andy missed the days when it was Mixon and his girl problems and his fucking whining. Intolerable as it was, it was still preferable to  _ this _ . “That’s not making a choice. You know Pete too well to think he’s gonna risk anything, like, ever. Hell,  _ I  _ know Pete well enough to know that.”

Andy rolled over onto his side and switched his phone to the other ear. It wasn’t that he expected anything from Pete. And it wasn’t that he necessarily had the, you know, burning desire to like, date Pete and hold hands with Pete and be - god, it sort of made his skin crawl to think the words - Pete’s  _ boyfriend _ . No, nothing like that. It wasn’t pining. It was, like…

“I just want to know if I fucked it up back then, y’know?”

On the other end of the phone, Mixon sighed. They’d covered this already. There had been a brief window of time back in the beginning of ‘99 - and even thinking about it Andy felt stupid, because it was  _ years _ ago - when every moment between them had seemed to open out onto a bright, luminous vista of possibility. When every smile they shared was shaded by the temptation to kiss, every memory that stitched them together seemed to line them up for the inevitability of, for lack of a better phrase, falling in love.

And then it had gone all pear-shaped, and Andy had folded up that beautiful future and tucked it in some back pocket of his mind and nearly forgotten about it, but never gotten rid of it.

“Okay,” Mixon said, and Andy jerked back to the reality of the bus lounge and the warm plastic of his phone against the side of his face. “Think of it like this. Does Pete know he’s supposed to be the one deciding something?”

Andy could’ve laughed. “Buddy, Pete doesn’t know a fuckin’ thing about anything.”  

 

**Saturday 8/13/15: New York, NY**

 

Behind him, the party was raging. Joe was following a set of vague and giggly directions from Justin Pierre, and he was, to be honest, pretty stoned already. The bright lights of the New York skyline guided him west, towards where the looming shape of the RFK Bridge was splashed against the backdrop of blurred sky. There were no stars visible out here, the city drowned them out, but it was beautiful in a different way.

He paused under the halo of a streetlamp to light a cigarette. The orange sodium glow covered him, made the shaggy hair that hung in his eyes look coppery and strange. He took a drag on the cigarette and started out again.

“Oh! You made it.”

Joe squinted towards the esplanade that overlooked the East River. Rows of benches stood gazing west towards where the sun had set hours ago, and on the river, the reflected lights of the city rippled and swayed. Patrick was leaning back against the railing, barely more than a smudge in the twilight, and Joe made his way towards him in the shadows.

“Yeah, I guess. Did you put Justin up to that?”

Patrick raised his hands, defensive. “Do you know how hard it is to get you alone anymore, dude?”

Joe stepped up to him, then past him, putting both palms on the cool iron of the railing. The racing lights of the JFK expressway gleamed across the river at them, and the city with all its chaos and noise seemed at once very near at hand and, in light of the beautiful evening, the river, the park, a whole world away. “Well, here I am,” he said. “What’s up?”

“We still haven’t talked. You know.” Patrick turned beside him so they were both looking out across the water towards the riot of lights that bordered the other edge of the river. “About how I kissed you.” He paused. In his peripheral vision, Joe could see Patrick swallow, like he could choke back his nervousness. When he spoke again, his voice wavered. “And how I meant to.”

Joe jerked his head around to stare at Patrick. “Are we like, really talking about this then? Because I gotta tell you I’m pretty stoned and kinda mad at you for being a jerk for the last, like, five weeks.”

To his indignation, Patrick  _ laughed _ . It was not like them, not like either of them for Joe to lose his temper and Patrick to remain calm. Patrick shrugged and looked down at where they both would be reflected in cleaner, stiller water. “I’m kinda zen about it, actually. Like I’m gonna hit you if you’re an asshole for no reason but I did all this navel gazing  _ feelings _ shit and I’m pretty, you know… I feel kinda enlightened.”

Joe frowned at him. “So enlighten me.”

“I wanna skip to the part where I kiss you again.” Patrick made no move to do so, and Joe only looked at him with the same calculating, bloodshot gaze he’d already had on.

“You can’t just jump ahead because you don’t want to deal with something,” Joe said finally. “That’s not how it works.” He dropped his cigarette over the railing into the churning water of the river.

Patrick watched the ember fall while it was still visible, a little speck of an orange glow, just for a moment. “I know,” he said. “Can’t blame a guy for trying, though, right?”

Joe made a face. “Guess not.” There was a breeze whipping fast off the river, blowing Joe’s curls back off his face, cooling his skin where it was still damp with festival sweat. “So you’re the one who made me come out here, like… Are you gonna….”

The moment hung between them. “Okay,” Patrick said. “Yeah, you’re right. I’m not… I had this thing all worked out to say and then, like -” He gestured to the picturesque cityscape in front of them. “- This is too much, right? This is overkill, I should’ve done this like on the bus or something, I just.” He was talking with his hands, and he put both palms firmly against the railing and took a deep breath. “Pretend I picked a better venue, okay? This is way too, like, romantic.” He gave Joe a bland smile. “Besides, I’m here to be selfish.”

“That’s not exactly, like, a departure from the norm, Patrick.” Joe kind of wished he wasn’t stoned. He leaned against the railing and squinted at the glare from the city lights.

“Fair enough. Can we, like, sit down?”

“Yeah.”

They did, at opposite sides of a bench that had been weathered by years of rain and toxic river water and smog. The damage the city did to things just by continuing to  _ be _ . Joe flexed his hands and felt a foggy, distant satisfaction at the pop of bones.

“Okay. So. You’re mad at me, cool, I get that. I’m gonna go ahead and, and acknowledge outright that it was pretty unfair of me to kiss you like that. Without, you know, asking, or being sober, like that’s not an excuse that was just me being an unintentional jerk.” Now that he was going, Patrick couldn’t seem to stop. The corner of his mouth tugged down when he tried to find the words. “The thing is, though. Okay, I’ve been thinking about it all wrong because I kept thinking, you know, ‘I made the first move now it’s Joe’s turn’ when like - okay, I apologize in advance because this is a sports metaphor and you know I don’t know shit about that - but I think I gave you a bad serve, or something? Anyway, I put a lot of, like, expectation on you. So sorry about that, first of all.”

He looked over at Joe. “Okay,” he said. “I mean, thanks, I know I haven’t like -”

“Shut up,” Patrick interrupted. “I’m being selfish, remember? Anyway I just wanted to tell you that like, it wasn’t a joke or a trap or anything. I did want to kiss you. Like, I  _ do _ , maybe not right now because we’re having this big important conversation but I’m probably, y’know. I guess I’m in love with you?” He spread his hands and gave Joe a big, self-deprecating grin. “Do with that what you will.”

“Oh.” Joe kicked his legs out in front of him, lounging against the bench. He supposed he had something to feel a little bit smug about, but mostly he felt overwhelmed. “Okay.”

The river purled out in front of them, flat in the darkness except for where the city lights caught on the peaks of the tide. If Joe concentrated he could almost hear the ceaseless blare of horns, the rushing of cars on the expressway, the rattle of the subway underneath them.

“Joe,” Patrick prompted. “It’s your turn.” He gave Joe a little nudge in the shoulder with his knuckles.

Joe grimaced. “Do I have to?” he complained. He tried to remember the particulars on his carefully-typed annotated list for the conversation he’d been planning to maybe have in two days. “Can’t I just -” His instincts took over. He reached for Patrick and hauled him across the empty space between them. Patrick squawked in his grip and ended up half in his lap, half slipping, precarious. “Hi,” Joe said, breathless, and kissed him.

It’s not that it was everything Joe had wanted their first kiss to be - his mouth was dry and sticky from the weed and Patrick kept wriggling around trying to find a solid way to sit that wasn’t too squarely in Joe’s lap and wasn’t going to land him on the concrete - but it was good. It was better.

“Okay?” Joe said, pulling back to lean his forehead against Patrick’s shoulder.

“Mm-hmm.” Patrick sounded dazed. He put both his arms around Joe’s neck but it seemed less out of any romantic overtures than of necessity, of the difficulty he was having holding himself upright. “You could do it again, I don’t mind.”

Joe pressed his mouth to the hinge of Patrick’s jaw. “Let’s go back to the bus,” he murmured. Patrick shivered in his arms.

“The bus is gross, dude,” he said.

“Patrick I’m not trying to bring you back to the bus to bone you, I’m trying to go to bed so we can get through the last two shows so we can go home and  _ then _ I can bone you.” He paused. “Although, like, we might have to take smaller steps in that regard.”

Patrick’s face colored. Joe wanted to kiss him. His brain followed up that desire with the realization that he  _ could _ kiss Patrick, if he wanted to, and he did so with gusto.

They broke apart some minutes later, gasping. “Okay,” Patrick said. “We can go back to the bus and go to bed.” He pushed his forehead against Joe’s, and it knocked his cap askew. “But can we do this a little more first?”

 

**Tuesday 8/16/05: Logan Int’l Airport, Boston, MA**

 

Pete hung back in the airport. Their flight back to Chicago didn’t start boarding for another forty minutes, but Joe and Patrick were already at the gate, self-conscious and absorbed in each other. It was good for them, Pete was happy about it. Even from a distance he could see Joe holding Patrick’s hand, at once casual and protective and overwhelmed. Pete loved them both, and he was trying not to be wary about loyalties and band politics when it had taken them so long to get to where they were. He turned away from the gate. Andy was flying back to Milwaukee on a flight that boarded in ten, and Pete fell into step beside him.

“Mixon meeting you on the other side?”

“Nah, dude, my  _ mom _ is.” Andy looked fucking pleased. For somebody so tough, he really hated being away from home.

“That’s awesome, dude.” Pete bumped his shoulder into Andy’s. “Come down to Chicago soon, though, okay? Don’t make me drive all the way up there to see you.”

“Man, aren’t you sick of me? I’m sick of me.” Andy gave Pete a gap-toothed grin. “I’ll be down for Joe’s birthday, I’m pretty sure your, like, legion of admirers can keep you occupied until then.”

Pete bumped into him again, then grabbed him by the elbow and pulled him into a vestibule full of payphones inset in the airport wall.

“Dude, what are you -”

“Shut up,” Pete said, and dragged him close, and kissed him.

When Pete let go, Andy mostly looked dazed. “What?” he said.

“I’ll do it again, Hurley, try me.” Pete felt adrenaline pumping through him. He clenched and unclenched his fists. He blinked hard to clear his mind.

“Pete…” A tense crease appeared between Andy’s eyebrows. “What are you doing?”

It seemed like a great time for the world to swallow Pete whole, or for him to get on his plane and figure out a way to crash it into a large body of water. “Dude, hasn’t it, like.” He huffed a breath out and looked down, away from Andy’s steady gaze. “Hasn’t it always been you and me? Am I imagining that? Because like…”

Andy looked at his watch, which made Pete want to die a little. “My plane is about to start boarding, and I don’t want to leave shit like this,” he said. “Like, yeah, though. You’re not imagining it.” He inhaled deeply through his nose. “I just don’t know if it’s the right time for this conversation. Tour, and fuckin, you know, Mikey -”

“You know about Mikey?” Pete squeaked.

“ _ Everybody _ knows about Mikey. That’s not the point.” Andy waved a silencing had in Pete’s face. “Look, I want to talk about this and I want to figure it out and I would be lying if I said I didn’t want you to, you know, kiss me again. But.” Andy’s face was flushed, and he blinked rapidly behind his glasses, focusing. “If we do this I want to get it right, okay?” He put his hand on Pete’s shoulder and gave him half a smile, familiar, the barest lines around the corners of his eyes just starting to show. “Be okay first. I’ve been waiting for, like, ten years, I’m not going anywhere.”

He pushed past Pete and off down the breezeway towards his waiting plane without saying goodbye. 

“Okay,” Pete said to the empty vestibule. “Sounds… Good.” He checked the time on his Sidekick. Yeah, about time to get back to his gate, he guessed.

 


	5. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just wrapping it all up. Thank you so much for reading!!

**Thursday 9/1/05: Chicago, IL**

 

Joe could hear Patrick before he saw him, all the windows of his car rolled down and him singing along to “Purple Rain” on the stereo. He pulled into Joe’s drive and cut the ignition, letting the air fall still and silent. Joe resisted the temptation to meet him at his car door and kiss him silly, and lingered instead on his stoop, watching Patrick get tangled in his seatbelt, free himself, and stride lazily up to greet him. 

“I’ve come to wish you an unhappy birthday,” Patrick said seriously, a grin flickering in his eyes as he took Joe’s hand. “Because you’re evil -” He leaned up on tiptoes to peck Joe discreetly on the corner of the mouth. “- and you lie.” 

“I didn’t mean to booty call Morrissey,” Joe said, laughing. He let Patrick inside and shut the door behind them. 

“Booty call? I’ve been deceived!” Patrick gave Joe’s shoulder a half-hearted shove, then let himself be reeled in by his wrist. Joe curved an arm around his waist and dipped his head to kiss him. 

“Actually,” he said, his voice breathy and low. “I had something more... intimate in mind.” 

Ten minutes later they were both hard at work folding the rest of Joe’s laundry. “You know,” Patrick said, “this isn’t exactly what I thought you meant when you said ‘intimate.’”

“What’s more intimate than this?” Joe said cheerfully, shifting a stack of linens off to one side and reaching for the last basket of rumpled laundry. “Besides, it’s my birthday, you have to do anything I want.”

Patrick made a face. “I don’t think that’s how it works,” he said, but he was still folding shirts, albeit sloppily. Joe figured he’d probably have to redo them later. Oh, well. 

The afternoon was at its zenith, breezy and sunny and warm. The laundry was put away, there was something more palatable than The Smiths on the turntable, and Patrick was kissing a lazy hickey into the crook of Joe’s neck. 

“Hey Patrick?” Joe asked. Patrick looked up from his work, leaning his weight on his forearm, thrown across Joe’s bare chest. His hair was a mess and his mouth was kissably pink. Joe thought he was probably the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. “Does it bother you that we haven’t…”

Patrick cocked his head. His eyebrows pulled together like he was thinking, or worrying, then he grinned. “Dude it’s been like two weeks.”

“I know,” Joe said. He cast his eyes up at the ceiling. “Just, like, it also feels like it’s been a lot longer than two weeks, in the, you know, grand scheme of things, kind of. And like, I don’t want to rush it but I also don’t want to get so caught up in making sure everything’s perfect that I wait too long because you know how I… And I’m rambling. Shit.” Patrick was laughing at him, one hand over his mouth, like he couldn’t help it. “Sorry.” 

“No, no, it’s just.” Patrick leaned forward and kissed him hard. “I just love you.” He kissed him again, softer, more thorough. Joe let himself drift on the feeling, how it made his head sort of bubbly and light, like being high but different. 

When they finally broke apart Joe kept his arms around Patrick’s soft middle, keeping him from moving too far. “I want to, you know. Like, I think about it… All the time. Like, an embarrassing amount.” 

“Gross, dude,” Patrick laughed, pressing in to kiss him again, the corner of his mouth and then his neck, his ear. “It’ll happen when it happens.” 

“Okay,” Joe said. He wasn’t really reassured but he said it anyway to make Patrick feel better, and that in itself soothed him in some measure. He didn’t let go of him for a long time. 

Afternoon faded into a burnt umber dusk, and they took Patrick’s car downtown and paid too much to park in a lot in the Loop. Pete had planned everything, which meant it hadn’t come together until just about the last possible second, but when it did it seemed effortless and perfect. They had the back room of a great restaurant to themselves and a standing invitation to anybody in town to drop by, the four of them holding court at a lavish table heaped with drinks and appetizers and a truly hideous cake in the shape of a Washburn Idol that Pete had gotten custom-made. They had a view of the river and the glittering lights on the other side of it; this was the part of Chicago they’d all dreamed about making theirs, and they had, and they were all - even Pete, maybe especially Pete - astonished and grateful for it. 

Justin and Matt and Jesse drove up from Minneapolis which flattered Joe so intensely he ordered a mortifyingly expensive round of cocktails for them. Justin, grinning behind his glasses, punched Patrick on the shoulder in his friendly, big-brotherly way and winked when he saw him take a swallow of Joe’s drink, unthinkingly, like sharing with him was the most natural thing in the world. They all guessed it must be. 

The evening wore on. Bill had stopped by early with Sisky and the Butcher in tow, Mike showed up in Gabe’s entourage. To everyone’s surprise and delight, Frank and Ray were in town with the excuse that they had to pick up Bob and drive him and his kit back to Jersey with them. Together they sang a polyrhythmic and horrifying happy birthday and Frank kissed Joe squarely on each cheek. “Gee would have come but y’know, the sober thing, and the Jersey thing. Mikey would’ve come, but, well.” He looked pointedly at Pete, who was laughing his stupid donkey laugh along with some terrible joke of Gabe’s, his head thrown back, all big teeth. 

“Don’t sweat it,” Joe told him. “Please get something self-indulgent on Pete’s tab, for Mikey’s sake. It’s my birthday wish.” 

Frank leered at him, delighted, and beckoned Ray over to the bar with mischief dancing in his eyes. 

And the evening marched on. People came and went. Joe took a long swallow of something fruity and bubbly, and pretended he couldn’t see Pete paying less and less attention to the party guests and more attention to Andy, who was blushing in a way that made him look a little drunk, even though he wasn’t. They were going to figure it out eventually, even if it took years. It had already taken years. At the height of the festivities Pete lit a mess of candles stuck at odd angles into the Idol cake and carried it over to Joe, beaming.

Joe blew out all the candles with one extended whoosh, and looked at Patrick over the glowing embers of them. Pete gave them all sloppily-sliced pieces of cake and ordered something expensive and vegan off the restaurant menu for Andy, because he’d forgotten to get something for him from the cake shop, because he’d done this all last-minute. Andy ribbed him about it ceaselessly until they were both laughing too hard to talk. 

Their table at the back of the restaurant bubbled with laughter. At its core, the four of them basked in the cool breeze coming in off the river: Patrick with a casual arm slung around Joe’s neck, red-cheeked and smiling; Joe, looking bashful at all the attention; Pete, the visible tension gone from his shoulders for the first time since before the record came out; and Andy, surreptitiously holding Pete’s hand and drinking a ginger ale. 

“What did you wish for?” Patrick asked. He was blushing like crazy the way he did whenever he had anything to drink, a boozey grin dimpling his cheek. 

Joe grinned down at him. It had taken them years to get here, or it had taken them weeks. It had taken them one really short conversation on the banks of the East river in New York City. “You know what, Patrick?” he said, and leaned down to kiss him. It was the easiest thing in the world. “I couldn’t think of a fuckin’ thing.” 


End file.
